Op-ed

Musical education has become a little less encouraged to many these days. For many reasons some people may think it looks useless to go to college for music education because there isn’t much you can do with it afterwards and not much requires you to have it. Music education is important and it should be more useful in getting students jobs that require a music degree. Amy Tompkins, a sophomore at Boise State University in Viola Performance share with us what professional orchestras think of music education when in the hiring process “…it's more about your ability than it is your education. If you can play well, then they don't care about how you learned”. In the performance side of things, musical education is not required. Being hired in a professional orchestra is all about how well you can play and pretty much nothing else.
But music is important for getting a job in other ways. For example you wouldn’t be able to get a job at a school, teaching music if you did not have a degree for this field. It also depends on the level of education you want to teach for the level of degree you’d need to have. Elementary through high school would only require a Bachelors degree. College would require at least a Masters if not a Doctorate. So having a Music Education degree is important in this field.
Music education has benefits to us in other ways. In a video from Youtube.com Jack Stamp talks about how the brain is working when kids are playing music. The left side of our brain computes all the technical things like what note is on the paper and how to play it, along with doing the math of how long to hold the note. The right side helps us to put the emotion into the music. This part of our brain is what makes us feel something when we hear or play music. Nothing in schools is able to connect both sides of our brain like music does, yet music education is still not recognized as being important.
Shelly Schwartz, who is a writer for CNBC and has reviewed many job and money related topics tells us how one with a music degree can get a job as a secretary, a teacher of elementary school, and a sales occupation including retail. How many of these jobs can someone without a college degree obtain? Why do places like this appreciate that you’ve graduated from college and yet a musical occupation doesn’t even take it into account? This seems a little wrong to me. We might have an easier time obtaining a secretary position with a college degree than someone with out it, yet we have a slim chance getting a job in which we use what we’ve actually learned from that degree.
Musical occupations should be making education a bigger deal and thus encouraging more students to go earn a degree in music rather than try to do music on their own. If the importance level of musical education stays where it is, eventually there will become no need to have it and less and less students will desire to earn it.