Berklee College of Music

Great American songbook… The music of Bob Dylan. With Al Kooper, Special guest. Sweet.

Berklee College of Music is a great college campus to tour. Don’t leave Boston without touring Berklee College of Music.

I attended this school and graduated, and have not regretted it for a minute. However, don’t even consider it if you are not completely sure that you want music to be your life. You need to be completely self-​driven and highly self-​motivated. No one will hold your hand to get you through. This is a practical music school for people who want to actually work in the field of music. Music is a highly competitive field and Berklee focuses on what you need to be a working musician. If you are sure that you want music to be your life and you have a strong work ethic, you will succeed at this music school.

I graduated from Berklee in 2014, and felt that my experience was worthwhile; but had some caveats.
First up, the general feeling around the campus is a overwhelmingly positive one. Everyone around has similar interests to your own, they are all reasonably intelligent and have a broad variety of talents. Everyone has put in a lot of work in one way or another, or else they wouldn’t be here (well, almost everyone). There are some of the most prestigious players around, both among the student base as well as within the faculty. It is a humbling place to be, and provides for a great environment for inspiration.
However, there are a lot of very deluded people at this school as well. A lot of people under the impression that they’re going to be famous the minute they leave the school and barely put in any work while they’re here — assuming the degree is going to do all the work. This mentality can be found everywhere and it is incredibly frustrating. You’ll often find 17 and 18 year olds who talk down to teachers and older students, it is disheartening.
I also had some absolutely awful classes. «Technology, Self, and Society,» for example. Classified as a «math & science course,» I was under the impression that the professor would be reasonably insightful; but, instead, he would say things such as «I hate science,» and «scientists are liars.» I had a few classes of simlar quality (though I also had a lot that were amazing).
The biggest problem with Berklee, though, is the administration. For one, tuition is far too expensive (I was lucky and got a scholarship — I also worked for two years to afford rent and the rest of my tuition), and I don’t feel you’re getting what you pay for. The education is good; but the facilities are not. I was an EPD major, and the studios were fairly good; but there were no quiet places to meet with friends and study. I often found myself going to MIT or NEU just to do some homework because there were no places in Berklee to do it.
There are a lot of caveats to attending Berklee, and I do not feel the need to list all of them here — apologies if this review has been rather rambly, I am typing in a stream-​of-​conscioussness mindset.
Truthfully, if you know what you want to get out of your education, then by all means attend Berklee; but if you have doubts, or if you are on the fence, wait to enroll. Otherwise you’ll be out a lot of money and perhaps won’t even get anything out of it.

It’s the best school of contemporary music in the world so yes, it is expensive. Any school like it will be expensive. It’s weird people seem so bent on the cost being worth it or not. I never hear people judging Julliard or the Sorbonne by what their graduates make. The bad reviews seem to be sour grapes from people who didn’t have the ambition to actually go. And yes, there is something to be said to go out and just play, particularly if you are a rock musician. But, that is just one career path and we all get old someday. If you want to teach, work as a session musician, compose, score films or whatever are all options you’ll have rather than getting an entry-​level office job as an aging rocker after you are done touring for years. As far as preparing people for the real world or being a real college, I graduated and have a BA. I got jobs where I needed to have a college degree. Let me assure you, when you get into the real world, a BA is a BA is a BA. Employers look for a degree or not, and the further away from college you get them more your work experience matters. There are plenty of history and English majors working in different fields, too. I don’t think a degree from a college outside of the Ivies opens many doors. I spent four years doing what I loved, which was worth more than saving money and going to a community college to me. The education is excellent and you can’t put a price tag of what it means to spend four years in contact with your fellow students, who happen to be some of the best and most serious musicians in the world.

If one truly desires to be a professional touring rock, jazz or pop musician… then hit the road and do it! Don’t waste your time in a classroom pretending to take it seriously. Your late teens and early twenties are precious and should be spent writing, practicing, playing shitty gigs, opening your mind to new music, making connections and getting better at your craft. I’m pretty sure most Berklee professors would agree. But if you’re going to go to a music school, Berklee’s good, but very expensive.

If you are a serious musician, then this is NOT the school for you. Most of the professors are lackadaisical. Unfortunately, most of the professors have the idea that if you are just good at playing your instrument OR good at research that makes you a good teacher. Being the best musician does not automatically make you the best educator. If you want to be just an improve artist then maybe Berklee is for you but if you’d like to become a well rounded musician then their are much better choices for schools at a better cost. As you first look into Berklee the faculty and staff make you seem like you are special but as soon as you pay your bill they couldn’t care less for you.
As a professional musician, studio owner and music teacher I do not recommend this school.

Irresponsible staff, terribly unorganized institution. I’m not sure how sugar-​coated the previous reviews are, but this is not the school you or your student should look at as a serious music institution. Most of the teachers are lax and uninformed. Literally any other music school in the area is a MUCH better choice for your dollar. They absolutely stop caring once the check has cleared. I had problems with class registration from Day One until graduation and it’s been FIVE YEARS since I graduated and I am still begging Berklee via phone, e-​mail, office visit, and letters to add the classes I registered for and took for semesters to my schedule. Horrible college. Doesn’t matter how talented everyone is if the school can’t meet the basic requirements of being a college. If I could have given them 0 stars, I would have. It’s ridiculous to register for classes at the beginning of the semester only to have them disappear at the end with no warning /​knowledge… very expensive waste.

I am the parent of a junior at Berklee. It has been a really fantastic experience for him both musically and personally. I was a bit concerned about it being a cutthroat and competitive environment that would shut him down, but he has found a great core of musical friends who are extremely serious and driven, like him, but also very supportive of one another. When I visit him and we walk down the street he runs into tons of students he knows, and they are all cordial and friendly and have their lights turned on. I’m sure there are lots of drug-​taking near burnouts, but if your kid is serious and eats/​lives/​breathes music (maybe the jazz kids are different) they will likely think they have died and gone to heaven.
Berklee has a large international group of students as well which adds to the broad experience it offers. Boston in general seems to admire and appreciate the Berklee kids, and it is a wonderful city for a college kid to experience.
In response to another parent who was complaining about performance opportunities, there probably aren’t as many chances to perform in more organized fashion but lots of chances to do gigs and the students seem to give smaller concerts. I haven’t heard any complaints from the kids I know, probably the parents are more into the big performance thing than the kids are. It just hasn’t seemed to be a big issue to my kid at least, and he does like to perform and is in performance degree.
Yes it is an expensive school, even with a scholarship, but I don’t completely see it as an investment in his «how much is he going to make» as the first major step in his life and development as a person. We are far from rich, and he does have a decent scholarship, and I do believe that musicians can make decent money doing private teaching in conjunction with other stuff. Are these kids looking to be rich? not if they love music and just can’t imagine anything else. They do have an undergrad degree when they come out and it isn’t useless, and from what I hear if you are good there are a lot of masters scholarship opportunities so you can parlay your Berklee undergrad into a Masters scholarship and teach in college.
I am really pleased with the experience he has had, and while I do worry a bit about his future, I’d worry more if he was going to be a corporate america drone!

As one reviewer outlined «tuition is rising 8% next semester. The members of the Board and the President all have 6 figure salaries above $ 300,000, combined they earn almost 3.5 million dollars.»
President Roger Brown has gone crazy in an effort to expand including opening a nearly useless «branch» in Valencia, Spain. He is also taken on a facilities expansion for the Boston campus. Much needed, but with multi multi-​million dollar project, they didn’t think to include a recital hall/​performance venue. A once-​in-​a-​life-​time expenditure and expansion, and the President doesn’t think to build these facilities at a college of music? Note the other reviews that mention the wretched performance/​recital situation.
The poorly treated faculty has among the highest teaching loads in the country. Berklee exploits its faculty by creating a uniquely high threshold for fulltime employment which leaves over half of their faculty with the distinction of part-​time classification. Part-​timers though they are teaching above the full-​time loads seen at virtually every other school in the country. These same overworked underpaid faculty also do not qualify for sabbatical nor do they have offices. In several instances, the «offices» are some twenty cubicles in a giant room. Nowhere to do ones work or meet or have use of a piano. Again… A music college where instructors don’t have use of pianos or privacy to use the piano and meet with students.
The President enjoys a salary that rivals that of the highest paid Presidents in the Boston area, and for some reason, thinks that his faculty not receive commensurate pay and working conditions. My father is a professor and after talking to some my teachers there, I realize the disparity. New high salary administrative positions being added, and the situation for the faculty doesn’t improve a bit, and yet the cost of tuition will be going up again.

This is a review ONLY of the Berklee Bursar’s office. They are TERRIBLE. Need to talk to the Bursar’s office about your incomprehensible statement so you can pay them tens of thousands of dollars? Get ready for a long wait. You’ll be on hold for an average of 20 minutes. Oh, and if there’s a mistake and it turns out your payment is incomplete? Well, then, it only takes them a millisecond to slap you with a $ 250 late fee. In my case, the bill was wrong, so even though I paid it in full, they determined we were short $ 300 (from a total bill of approximately $ 15,000. The result? A $ 300 late fee.

Take my review for what its worth since I am a parent of a former student and not an actual student. I agree completely with those that say you get out of it what you put in. I also agree that the contacts you make for networking will be useful as well. I also agree with one statement complaining about the performance opportunities there. There are thousands of music students with one major performance center which the overwhelming majority of students will never get to play on. There were more performance opportunities in high school.
Now for the reality part. Kids with good traditional college degrees from good schools are finding it difficult to find any jobs today (2011). College grads are lining up for retail jobs and jobs where you traditionally did not need college. Berklee is great to teach you about the music industry but should not be considered a college because it has the minimum amount of core requirements of a normal college and the education is not well rounded enough for the real world. This is important because the vast majority of graduates from Berklee will not have long term music careers and will need to fall back on something else, and Berklee will not prepare them for anything else. The degree is almost worthless except for a very small percentage of low or non-​paying jobs. Berklee administration will tell you about all the new creative ways of making a living in the music industry, but ask yourself if those opportunities are realistic enough to warrant an investment of $ 40K+ per year.
Berklee will be great for some people, but that percentage will be very small. The name should really be Berklee School of Music because it is not really college. You really need to think hard about investing over $ 40K per year and 4 or more years of your life because most won’t be able to afford to go back to school after Berklee. If you are getting a full ride or close to it, then go for it. My child got a decent scholarship of $ 7K/​year but it was still a bad choice and bad investment. After high school, I was all in favor of my child going to Berklee and I chose to ignore similar warnings from others. In looking back, it was the worst financial investment I ever made.

ONE HELL OF AN EXPENSIVE SCHOOL! I have enjoyed my time at Berklee mostly because I was employed by them and they pay me to come to school now. It is not unusual for teacher to be late to class and for the majority of the students to be treated unfairly. There is so much talent at Berklee, but only few students get many performance opportunities or showcased at all. Liberal Art classes are a joke; not because of the teachers, because of the students that don’t care. In general… I had a great time at berklee, but I feel like there is a hierarchy of politics going on.

I attended and graduated from Berklee (magna cum laude), but I wouldn’t do it again.
Berklee is the best contemporary music school in the world, and there are tons of opportunities to make great music there.
It could be a great time if you are independently wealthy, and money is of no object (or if Berklee, mom or dad, or whomever besides you is paying for it), but if you are going to pay for it yourself (or with loans), you probably shouldn’t be going there. It is probably one of the worst investments you could ever make. In addition, if you want to make money coming out of college you shouldn’t be going to Berklee because the best steady job someone who graduates from Berklee can get is to teach at Berklee. In fact, 95% of the Berklee graduates that I know that are working in the «music industry» are teaching guitar lessons.
So, in short, great music college, horrible career counseling, horrible investment.

Like anything in life, your experience of Berklee is dependent on what you put in to get out.
Most of my teachers were amazing, talented, caring people who taught me a lot about the industry and about music itself. The few that weren’t, well, were overshadowed by the majority that were.
I was constantly amazed at the talent and the drive of so many of my fellow students. Just being at this school where you have an automatic conversation starter of, «So what’s your instrument?» or «What kind of music are you into?» was like an instant bonding experience, the fact that everyone is there for the same reason, their shared love of music. I even fondly look back on the arguments I had with the hard core jazzers who thought jazz = the only kind of music ever worth of being recorded or played. Good times.
There were also quite a lot of burnouts… not sure if that was due to the whole college factor in general, or because it’s a contemporary music school, or a bit of both, but there was quite a lot of substance being done that I saw, dudes who apparently thought they were already rockstars.
The greatest thing about Berklee is the resources, if you use them to your advantage. I made friends pretty early on with a lot of MP&E majors (music production and engineering) so I always had guys wanting to use me as a guinea pig for their projects, thus getting lots of free studio time and semi-​professionally recorded songs. Also having a bunch of musician friends around who were all rabid to play, for free, was such a cool thing. If you jumped in with both feet and networked and put yourself out there as a musician you got back a whole lot of opportunities.
The one thing I would complain about is the lack of performance opportunities. Being in the vocal program I saw how heavily politics played in the choosing of singers for the few shows Berklee did every year. But I suppose it’s that way in the real world as well. There just weren’t enough opportunities — I recall Singer’s Showcase, Singer’s Night, and then recitals if you were in the performance program. Outside of that, there wasn’t much if you were looking to get your feet wet outside of your classes.
Berklee was an absolutely amazing experience for me. In truth, I did suffer a bit of burn out after a few semesters of analyzing pieces of music to death, being critiqued on my songwriting, and basically eating, sleeping, and breathing music for several semesters in a row, but I learned so much, in a wonderful city, and wouldn’t trade my time there for the world.

This place changed my life, for better and worse. Arguably, the best contemporary music school in the world, far and away the best institute for music technology in the country, Berklee College of Music offers an education geared toward a (more or less) practical application of music in the modern industry, based on an understanding of theory taught from a jazz perspective, rather than classical, which most other music schools and conservatories prefer.
Be warned, Berklee College of Music has a notoriously low enrollment to graduation ratio, that is due in part to the intensive nature of the curriculum. Most incoming students enter with the misguided idea that they attending some sort of grown-​up «school of rock» or maybe even «the Hogwarts of music» as one of my teachers put it, but instead they find Berklee’s courses difficult, the level of competition among peers very high and are faced with perhaps for the first time in their life the challenge of mental shifting their attitude about music from something that used to be pleasure to something that has to become very serious work.
That, I found, to be my greatest challenge, but once it was overcome, I appreciated the college as a dynamic, diverse microcosm of the music industry where I was lucky enough to forge life-​long relationships with friends and supportive mentors that (despite Berklee’s high price tag) I consider invaluable.

There is a lot of talent at the Berklee College of Music. There is a HUGE wealth of information to be learned from the accomplished staff, and from the diverse and VERY inspiring students, playing and having musical conversations with people you otherwise never would’ve met.
The film scoring major is great. Songwriting is great. You can find expertise and dive deeply into any and every area you want.
It’s just about as expensive a college as you can find, and it’s like pulling teeth to even get a dime for scholarship.
Berklee has a 3 out of 4 dropout rate. Only the strong survive. The connections you make at berklee can be deep and significant. It’s a wonderful college. I am blessed to have been able to go there.

I took summer workshops here when I was in high school. I learned a lot, like that I didn’t want to go here after graduation. Seriously though, I am definitely a better musician for having gone to those workshops, but most of the kids I talked to that were enrolled in actual classes told me that since they had come to Berklee, they hate music on account of that is all they could eat, sleep, or breath day in and day out. And that, in my opinion, is not conducive to growth as a musician or a person.

good music school in the heart of boston. tons of the local musicians you see around boston are currently studying here. They have lots of interesting performances from musicians they bring in as well that are open to the public.