Over the next two years, the Conservatory’s Division of Music Education, which currently awards teacher certification with the Bachelor of Music degree, will make a transition to a Master’s Program that will take two summers and one school year to complete. This marks an end to the undergraduate music education major, the first in the country in 1921, and there will be no incoming music education freshmen next year. If students want to be certified to teach, they will have to earn a performance degree and then enroll in the Master’s Program.

According to Dean of the Conservatory David Stull, “States are headed in a direction where they’re going to require a master’s degree for music educators sooner than they had in the past. Since we’re in the business of certifying, we have to look at national standards and say, are we preparing our students really well?”

Director of the Division of Music Education Jody Kerchner added, “When we look at the economy, the job market, the state requirements across the United States for our students, we’re realizing that we can serve our student population in music education a little bit better if we were to go to a Master’s Program. Most states are moving toward a professional model, where one has to either have a Master’s or have significant credits towards a Master’s within five, eight or ten years.”

The Conservatory currently offers a Master’s Degree in Music Education that does not include teacher certification.

“If you’re a performance major and you decide in your junior or senior year that you’re interested in music education, [the current Master’s Programs] are not really designed to certify you,” said Stull. “For performance majors who decide they’d like to do some teaching, we don’t really have an entry point later in the program for them.”

“More and more 18-year-olds that are showing up are, for whatever reason, not as focused on making a career decision so soon,” Stull continued. “We’ve noticed a trend where students are a little bit more unsure, so the notion of moving the window of that decision point a little further back, I believe, is also attractive from the standpoint of the faculty.”

While plans for the program will not affect curriculum or certification for current undergraduate music education majors, some students are concerned that moving music education into an all Master’s Program may discourage some prospective students from applying to the Conservatory.

“There are a lot of good teaching candidates who could just never see themselves performing in an orchestra and don’t want to, who have chosen to be teachers. I think that having a Master’s-only program after you complete your Bachelor’s in Performance is going to drive a lot of people away,” said junior music education major Ruthanne Fisher.

In a survey conducted among 27 current music education majors, 13 replied that they would not “have attended/been interested in Oberlin if the undergraduate MUED program didn’t exist,” and 16 replied that the “old graduate programs” were not a determining factor in their interest in Oberlin.

There is also some debate among students as to what experiential learning the Master’s Program will forgo in its condensed format. According to junior music education major Tiffany Chang, “They make us do hands-on things in the schools from the very beginning, and I think you can really see yourself develop in the four years that you are here, whereas if you just had a year and two summers, everything would be so compact that you would just be learning skills, but you wouldn’t have the opportunity to develop them over a long period of time.”

Chang added, “Most music education majors see music education as their primary thing that they do. I don’t think a lot of them would want to wait until their fourth year to declare music ed. Having gone