Why so many of us didn’t make it.

A decade inside the profession, two graduate degrees, and one research paper later.

I’ve been thinking for years about the musicians who didn’t “make it.”

Not the stars. Not the competition winners. Not the names that end up on orchestra rosters or conservatory faculty pages. I mean the people everyone quietly believed would make it. The extraordinary players who seemed to possess every quality the profession claimed to reward: discipline, intelligence, musicality, work ethic, devotion.

And yet, somewhere along the way, many of them vanished from the professional pipeline.

CSUF University Orchestra performance at Carnegie Hall, November 2015. I was playing second flute/ piccolo.

I think about the friends I trained alongside as a young flutist in Southern California. The musicians I watched sacrifice nearly everything to pursue orchestral careers. The colleagues who spent their twenties and thirties moving between freelance gigs, church jobs, teaching, summer festivals, and regional orchestra auditions, trying to remain economically afloat long enough for the profession to finally make room for them. Some eventually won jobs. Many did not. Most never will.

What troubled me was that these outcomes never felt fully explainable through talent alone, even though conservatories consistently reinforce the idea that hard work and practice are ultimately what will get you there.

Classical music presents itself as a meritocracy. From an early age, musicians are taught to believe that the profession rewards excellence: practice harder, play better, sacrifice more, and the system will recognize ability accordingly. But the longer I remained inside the field, first as a flutist and later as an arts administrator, the harder it became to ignore the structural patterns beneath that narrative.

The turning point came in Karen Dynan’s macroeconomic policy course at Harvard Kennedy School, where we studied the Solow growth model and broader questions surrounding labor, capital, and productivity. It was not a class about orchestras or conservatories. But it fundamentally changed how I thought about systems. For the first time, I began viewing classical music as a labor market shaped by supply, demand, scarcity, and unequal access to opportunity.

Once I started looking at the profession through that lens, the social sciences began giving me language for what I had been witnessing for years.

Gary Becker’s human capital theory helped explain how early investments in skills compound over time and why investment gaps persist. Who had access to private lessons at age twelve? To quality instruments costing tens of thousands of dollars? To elite summer programs with the best teachers? The gap was never random.

Baumol’s cost disease clarified something else: live performance industries cannot meaningfully scale. It takes the same four musicians the same amount of time to perform a Beethoven quartet today as it did in 1800. Orchestras cannot continually expand, even as music programs continue producing performance graduates at increasing scale.

Lazear and Rosen’s tournament theory gave structure to the sequence musicians know intimately: pre-college auditions, conservatory admissions, studio placements, graduate programs, and eventually professional auditions. Each stage magnifies early advantage. Missing one round does not simply slow you down. Often, it removes access to the next one entirely.

Claudia Goldin’s work on “greedy professions” clarified how careers demanding uninterrupted, inflexible time commitments disproportionately advantage those with external financial support. Twenty to thirty hours of weekly practice. Years on the audition circuit after graduation. The musicians who could survive that period were not necessarily more talented. They were often better resourced.

Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital pointed toward something conservatories rarely acknowledge openly: auditions do not simply evaluate technique. They reward familiarity with elite teacher lineages, aesthetic expectations, and institutional norms that many students absorb long before they ever walk into a lesson room.

Anthony Jack’s research on post-admission inequality sharpened the point further. The issue was not only succeeding after entry into elite institutions. It was that many students from underrepresented backgrounds never gained access to those institutions in the first place.

Taken together, these frameworks pointed toward the same conclusion: the outcomes I had watched play out across my friends’ and colleagues’ lives were not accidents. They were not the result of insufficient practice or insufficient passion. They were the predictable product of a system operating exactly as it was structured to operate.

David Throsby’s work in cultural economics ultimately provided the broader architecture that connected everything together: a framework for understanding the arts as economic systems with their own labor dynamics, incentive structures, and measurable relationship to supply and demand.

Eventually, the question became unavoidable:

Are we overproducing music graduates?

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Why I Was Asking

I should explain where I was coming from.

Ten years earlier, I had left Powell Flutes feeling something close to hopeless. I had a degree in flute performance. I had spent my entire working life inside classical music. And I had almost no transferable skills that would help me navigate the broader Boston labor market.

I did not come from generational wealth. I was the first in my family to attend college, and I only reached higher education because California’s public university system created pathways that made it financially possible. I attended prestigious summer music programs largely through my own fundraising efforts. I afforded private lessons by maintaining a portfolio career: teaching, freelancing, gigging, and working part-time jobs to generate enough income to continue training.

But eventually I reached a point of economic uncertainty: find stability or leave Boston.

I returned to school for my MBA at Boston University Questrom School of Business because I needed tangible skills. Marketing strategy. Data analysis. Organizational behavior. Python. R. I wanted tools that would allow me to stop relying solely on intuition and begin measuring the system directly.

The MBA gave me technical capabilities. But it was my time at Harvard Kennedy School that brought the larger framework into focus. Policy analysis, economics coursework, and research methods transformed years of personal observation into a coherent set of questions worth pursuing seriously.

The irony is not lost on me. I was living inside the very human capital theory I was studying. Investments in education and skills produced better labor-market outcomes. I had returned to school specifically to acquire competencies my music degree had not provided.

And it worked.

Better tools led to better opportunities. Better opportunities created greater stability. Greater stability gave me the intellectual space to begin asking the questions I had carried for years.

I was paying to fix a gap the first credential had left open.

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The Question

How many music performance graduates does the United States produce every year, and how many professional jobs actually exist to absorb them?

It sounds like a simple question. It is not a question the field has answered clearly or publicly.

Conservatories track their most successful alumni. They celebrate audition wins and major orchestra placements. They are considerably less eager to publish data on what happens to the other 95 percent of graduates: the musicians who spend years freelancing, leave performance entirely, accumulate debt, or continue pursuing a labor market that was never realistically capable of absorbing them at scale.

But the question extends beyond conservatories. Professional orchestras themselves operate within severe structural constraints. Most ensembles cannot meaningfully expand their number of full-time positions. Budgets are finite. Turnover is low. Many orchestras have spent decades navigating financial instability, labor disputes, declining subscription models, and shifting philanthropic priorities. Highly qualified musicians are competing for an extraordinarily small number of stable jobs in a labor market where demand has remained relatively fixed while the supply of trained performers has continued to grow.

At the same time, orchestras and conservatories increasingly position themselves publicly as institutions committed to equity, representation, access, and community engagement. Diversity initiatives, fellowship programs, and public statements about inclusion have become central to the field’s institutional language over the last decade. Many of these efforts are genuine and necessary responses to longstanding inequities within classical music.

But they also exist alongside a professional pipeline that remains remarkably concentrated. A small number of elite institutions continue to dominate placements into the country’s orchestras, while access to the training pathways feeding those institutions remains deeply unequal. The contradiction is difficult to ignore: the field increasingly speaks in the language of inclusion while relying on a labor system that continues to reproduce many of the same structural advantages it claims to be addressing.

At the same time, conservatories and orchestras are only two parts of a much larger ecosystem. Foundations, donors, unions, competitions, summer festivals, faculty networks, audiences, arts administrators, and public policy all shape the incentives and constraints surrounding professional classical music. No single institution created these conditions on its own, and no single institution can solve them alone. If the field is serious about expanding opportunity and building a healthier profession, the right parts of the ecosystem need to begin speaking to one another more honestly about the structural realities everyone is operating within.

None of this means orchestras are acting in bad faith. In many cases, they are responding rationally to the incentives surrounding prestige, fundraising, donor expectations, labor competition, and institutional survival. But it does raise a larger question about who the profession is ultimately structured to serve, and whether its public commitments can be fully reconciled with the economic realities of the pipeline itself.

The result is a profession where extraordinary levels of training and specialization are funneled into a labor market structurally incapable of absorbing everyone it prepares.

I wanted to know what the actual numbers looked like.

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Building the Dataset

The challenge was not that the data did not exist. It was that no one had assembled it in one place.

The supply side turned out to be the easier problem. The federal government’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) tracks degree completions at every Title IV-participating institution in the country. Using the Python and R skills I had acquired at Questrom and Harvard, I compiled IPEDS completion data spanning 2011 through 2024: thirteen years of degree production across six orchestral performance CIP codes from 1,571 institutions.

That produced the supply side of the market: 127,876 orchestral performance degrees.

The demand side was harder.

Professional orchestras publish their rosters publicly. Some also publish musician biographies containing educational histories: where performers studied, what degrees they earned, and who they trained with. The information existed, but it was scattered across dozens of orchestra websites, facebooks, LinkedIn pages, unstructured and unlinked to the broader educational pipeline.

So I built a model to compile it.

I collected and standardized biographical data from 89 American orchestras and linked those educational histories to the IPEDS institutional data. For the first time, at least to my knowledge, the supply side and demand side of the American orchestral labor market existed within the same dataset.

And once they did, the picture became difficult to ignore.

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What the Data Showed

I initially believed I was investigating whether the field was overproducing music graduates.

The answer was yes. Substantially, structurally, and for decades.

What I did not anticipate was how concentrated professional outcomes would prove to be.

Seven institutions — Juilliard School, Curtis Institute of Music, New England Conservatory, Cleveland Institute of Music, Rice University, Eastman School of Music, and Indiana University Jacobs School of Music — produce only 11.9 percent of orchestral performance degrees in the United States.

Yet those same institutions account for:

• 57.9 percent of musicians in the country’s eight most prestigious orchestras

• 50.6 percent of musicians in the nation’s largest-budget professional ensembles

Put differently, twelve schools account for more than half of all professional placements. Thirty-five account for roughly three quarters. Meanwhile, more than 1,500 institutions continue producing orchestral performance degrees nationwide.

The data revealed a labor market characterized by extraordinary institutional concentration. Professional outcomes were not distributed evenly across the educational landscape. They clustered heavily around a relatively small group of elite training institutions that appear to function as dominant gateways into the upper tiers of the profession.

Viewed through the lens of tournament theory, the orchestral pipeline begins to look less like a single open competition and more like a sequence of increasingly selective filters, where early access to elite institutional networks substantially shapes downstream opportunities. Lazear and Rosen described this dynamic formally decades ago. Once I began viewing classical music through that framework, the pipeline looked very different.

The question I started with — are we overproducing music graduates? — ultimately turned out to be the smaller question.

The larger one was this: Who is the system actually working for?

The full paper, The Meritocracy Myth: Supply–Demand Concentration and Economic Barriers in Elite Orchestral Pipelines, is currently available in preprint as I continue to prepare it for peer review submission.

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Why I’m Publishing This Here

I am not a professional researcher. I do not have a lab, a grant, or a research team behind this work. I built this dataset independently, in the margins of a full-time career in arts administration.

I am a musician who went back to school, acquired analytical tools, and turned them toward a profession I had spent most of my life inside.

I’m starting this substack because I believe these conversations need to exist publicly. Academic research papers are important, but they rarely reach the orchestra administrators, conservatory faculty, arts funders, students, and working musicians most directly affected by the systems being described.

This publication is where I want to think through those questions.

Some posts will be research-driven. Some will be essays. Some will be institutional critiques. Some might just be memes. All of them emerge from the same conviction:

I have data, frameworks, and years of lived experience to draw on, but I do not have all the answers, and I am not pretending to. What I do have is a research paper, a dataset, questions I believe are worth asking publicly, and a Substack where I intend to explore them.

So here is my invitation:

If something here resonates with you, subscribe and share it with someone else who has been thinking about these questions. If you work inside an orchestra, conservatory, foundation, or music school, I want to hear what you are seeing from where you sit. The research gets better through conversation. So does the field.