I'm Adam Manus.

And I'm Peter Martin.

And you're listening to the You'll Hear at Podcast.

Is a Berkeley degree worth $240,000?

It sounds like a loaded question.

You know I went to the new school, right? Yeah. Is the new school worth $235,000? It's a little cheaper, right? I don't think it is anymore, actually. Okay.

I don't know, man. I left after year two. Okay. Is it worth $130,000? Oh, that's bad math, too.

I mean, I didn't even get a degree.

He's paid all that money for nothing.

Yeah, so, I mean, today we're going to just dive into a little free form here. There's no seven lists. Yeah. This is not seven reasons why it is worth it. We're going to try to see. I have the feeling we're not going to come to a conclusive answer, but we're going to debate, perhaps, and discuss if a modern jazz

performance degree is really worth what they're charging for it.

Well, this is pretty timely.

You know, we deal with a lot of young musicians coming out of St. Louis.

There's a lot of great young musicians coming out of St. Louis.

And Berkeley or some of these jazz colleges are always high on their list, and we're helping them try to get into them a lot of times.

But it is a good question, you know, should you be paying all that money for a degree in the field of jazz when do you need to go to college to be able to play this music?

You know, Coltrane never went to Berkeley, and he sounded pretty good. Yeah. And I think, yeah, I mean, it probably begs the bigger question. I mean, it's not exclusive to jazz or even conservatories, the outlandish prices that they're asking. Well, I don't want to get ahead of myself. I can't call it outlandish, but you can see where I'm going with this.

Now, having said that, I think that the level of jazz schools, jazz conservatories, jazz programs

within bigger schools of music, the level at many of them is, I think, the highest it's ever been.

Yeah, there was definitely a point probably in the 90s where there were a lot of new jazz

programs, and the level of education wasn't that great. It wasn't. They were building or rebuilding

or just starting up, inexperienced teachers, inexperienced admins. But now it's a pretty good

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