Shepherd School of Music ranks high

By Kevin Lin     8/26/10 7:00pm

The Shepherd School of Music started off this year with a standing ovation. According to the 2011 edition of The Fiske College Guide, the Shepherd School was ranked among among the top ten music schools in the nation. Other schools mentioned in Fiske's top 10, ranked in no particular order, include the Juilliard School, New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Oberlin College, Yale University, Berklee College of Music, University of California at Los Angeles, Carnegie Mellon University, Curtis Institute of Music, Eastman School of Music and Indiana University.

The Fiske College Guide, published annually for more than 25 years, describes itself as a guide to some of the best and most promising colleges and universities in the U.S., Canada and Great Britain.

Dean of the Shepherd School of Music Robert Alan Yekovich said the ranking was unexpected since the Fiske does not usually rank music schools, but said the results were not all that surprising.

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"The Shepherd School has already for a number of years been considered one of the top schools of music in the country," Yekovich said.

Associate Professor of Composition and Theory Karim Al-Zand said the rankings confirmed his expectations.

"We have a really talented and world-renowned faculty in all our departments," Al-Zand said. "All our programs are very strong and I think as a whole, our school has all the qualities needed to make a topnotch school."

Generally, music school rankings are based on a number of metrics related to student admission. Yekovich said that a prominent indicator of rankings is student yield, which is the percentage of students that end up coming to the school after being accepted.

Yekovich said that the Shepherd School of Music and the Juilliard School have been consistently been number one in student yield.

"It goes back and forth between the two," Yekovich said. "We and Juilliard at the graduate level also have one of the highest yields in the country."

Yekovich said that another indicator of rank is cross applications. The Shepherd School of Music uses cross applications to keep track of other schools Shepherd applicants have also applied to and where they end up going after being accepted. Yekovich said that Shepherd does very well in cross applications; many students who get accepted to other music schools in the Fiske top 10 ranking, including the Juilliard School, often end up choosing to come to Shepherd.

"The greatest asset of the Shepherd School is its faculty," Yekovich said. "We have a number of distinguished faculty here: distinguished performers, scholars, composers - and it's a well-known fact that in the music school business, students go to study with particular teachers."

McMurtry College sophomore Bailey Firszt, a viola major at the Shepherd School, reiterated Yekovich's assessment.

"Every faculty member I've ever worked with in any context has been incredible," Firszt said. "I have a one-on-one mentor relationship with my teacher these four years. We meet one-on-one every week and afterward he's an advocate for me. I just feel like my teacher is an endless source of knowledge. It's a good thing I have four years here, but I don't feel like I can get to the end of it."

Yekovich said that Shepherd's other primary asset is its narrow focus.

"We're strictly classical," Yekovich said. "We don't try to do a lot of things; we just try to do a few things, and we do them very well."

Yekovich also cited Rice University's steadfast support of the music school as a reason for its success.

The Shepherd School of Music is currently 35 years old and has a total of 285 students, around 120 of whom are undergraduates. The entering undergraduate class is usually around 22 to 35 students. Yekovich said this makes Shepherd one of the smallest schools of music in the nation and that these numbers will not change in the future.

"I love the community at Shepherd," Firszt said. "You see how hard other people are working and it pushes you. I never feel like I'm competing against other students. We're all going for the same goal. One person's accomplishment doesn't take away from us.

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