In a chilling assessment of the state of tertiary music education, Ian Pace predicts further department closures after Oxford Brookes and fewer employment placements for the dwindling number of graduates.

Here’s a sample from his must-read essay in The Critic.

… The most recent figures available show 16 per cent of students doing plain “music” courses, 26 per cent music technology, 19 per cent musical theatre, 12 per cent popular/commercial music, 16 per cent performance (around 12 per cent at conservatoires, 4 per cent at other institutions excluding private providers). All except plain music degrees are directly vocational, supposedly leading to particular types of employment, and are therefore less focused upon the delivery of “transferable” skills which would serve graduates well in other fields of work. However, the relationship between these vocational degrees and demand in the music industry is far from established — it is unclear how much properly-paid work is available to the thousands of annual graduates in music production and musical theatre…

Perhaps most significantly, there has been a sharp decline in provision of music in secondary education during the 2010s, with a fall of over 38 per cent in the numbers of state schools and colleges offering A-Level Music between 2010 and 2018. This last factor has meant a dwindling number of pupils leave school with the necessary skills in notation, theory, repertoire required to undertake a plain Music degree. Universities could offer foundation years to compensate for this lack of skills, but these are costly to provide, and can have negative effects on the wider metrics by which institutions are held accountable by governments… Cutting a music programme can represent a significant saving for universities facing financial difficulties….

Read on here.