Nice, provocative post on an important subject (Nissim the composer thinks about how he’s going to make money writing music quite a lot…) I’m also a bit of a baseball fan, and I think you’ve missed a few things that both strengthen and weaken your case.

The biggest - and most important - difference between college baseball and conservatory is that you don’t go to college to learn to play baseball. You go to college to learn period. You don’t get a degree in “baseball performance.” In fact, many many young baseball players don’t go to college - they go straight to the minor leagues. (more on the minors below) Plus, most college baseball players know they’re never going to play baseball professionally, much less in the majors. I’ll bet of those 10,000 college players, 8000 of them know already that they’ll never even play in the minors, much less The Show. However, you do go to college to learn to play an instrument/sing/compose/etc. And you don’t learn an awful lot of other stuff. Those humanities courses at conservatories, as I’ve heard, are a bit of a joke - but they ought to be, since you’re basically learning a vocation at conservatory. Just like pastry cooks and mechanics don’t really need to understand John Stuart Mill or the Iliad in order to do their job, neither do musicians. [this is somewhat false - musicians do need to understand the human condition, and therefore literature, philosophy, history, the other arts. But since musical production is so physical, sort of like being an athlete, you have to do the intense, advanced training when you're still young. I think the idea must be that you can always go back and learn how to think critically later. Personally, I'm very glad that I decided at 17 to go to a liberal arts school instead of conservatory.]

So from that perspective, conservatory is actually substantially worse for future musicians than college is for baseball players - college athletes (except the ones at high-profile basketball and football programs - still a relatively small number) are also learning how to form logical arguments, how to write well, how to do research, etc - skills that will help them get through life in general.

However, let me get back to the minors. True, there are only about 750 major league baseball players at a time. But there are thousands and thousands of other professional baseball players wandering around the minors (not to mention leagues in Japan and Latin America) trying real hard to make it to The Show. There’s still not a great chance that you as a pretty good college player will end up even in the minors, but it does expand the possibilities. The analogy I’d make is:

The Major Leagues are sort of like the major orchestras, which offer good pay, good work schedules, and good benefits. Every once in a while, someone turns out to be way way better than everyone else - here we have your Alex Rodriguezes and Ichiros and Yo-Yo Mas and Emerson Quartets.

Then, everyone else is the minors. There are levels in the minors, but in general pay is middle class at best, and pretty godawful low at worst. Most minor leaguers who aren’t big-league prospects have off-season jobs to pay the rent/mortgage/grocery bill. Just like freelancers and violin teachers have to have multiple sources of income. All of the above are doing it for the love of the game/music or because it’s what they’re best at. Not to mention that musicians can become high school music teachers, which offers a way better fall-back than baseball does.

Ultimately, most conservatory trained musicians don’t end up playing for the NY Phil, but an awful lot of them eke out a living somehow. In that way, it’s not all that different from pro ball.

(though I’m tempted, I’m not even going to get into the commodification of American higher education or treating art as commerce. too much already!)

The root of the problem is perhaps cultural. In England, it is not uncommon for musicians to train as chemists, lawyers or engineers but still take lessons and gig. Sometimes these professionals abandon their careers and take up music full time but more often that not, the two co-exist peacefully. The strong amateur movement means that there are plenty of satisfying places to play and sing.

This is generally not the case in North America and Miss Mussel feels that we are culturally poorer for it.