So you think you’d like to teach, huh? You think you’d be good at it, and you know that there are a large number of singers out there who need teachers, why shouldn’t it be you?
Let’s suppose you have also decided that you don’t want to have a private studio, but would prefer to teach with a school and have decided that college is the best place for you. You’re ready to join the ranks of academia!
Now the hard part, how…
The advice today is close to the same as it was 20 years ago. If you want to teach at the collegiate level, go have a career, first. You’ll be a known entity in the business, have real-world experience, and you’ll know what you are doing in the teaching studio by then, ideally.
However, some elements of the business has changed a great deal in the last 20 years and many singers are now teaching AND performing a the same time. Sometimes, singers try to simultaneously cultivate the performance and the academic career. Possible, but difficult.
First, ask yourself this question: “Why do I really want to teach at a University?” Here are some of the more popular reasons:
- Health Insurance
- Job stability
- Possibility of tenure
- Less time on the road
- Pass on your knowledge to young musicians
- Investment options
- A steady paycheck
- An opportunity to work and collaborate with other high-caliber musicians.
- To give back in a meaningful way to the system that provided you with your education.
- Expand your resume and skill set
What else? What about academia is most appealing to you?
Do your personal reasons differ from those listed above? Not so sure academia is right for you after reading that list, or are you more convinced that this is the place for you?
Reality check. Let’s see if we can give a more accurate picture of what to expect from academia as a full-time professor:
- Average salary ranging anywhere from $30,000 a year to $70,000 a year with many exceptions on either end of that range.
- Health benefits
- Possible Retirement Investment Options including matching contributions anywhere from 3% to possibly as high as 14%
- Possible tenure positions with a 3-6 year tenure track
- A teaching load of up to 18 students per semester, or a combination of students and courses that equal approximately 18 contact hours. This can be higher or lower depending on the individual school and department needs. If this school is NASM accredited, this also plays a role in your work load.
- Approximately 3 months of Summer off (usually), or the option to teach and earn extra income during the summer
- The option to get paid over a period of 12 months, or on a 9 month cycle.
- Opportunities to move in to administration through positions such as Department Head, Assistant Dean, or Dean.
- Access to university resources for research and publication
What can you typically expect as an adjunct professor?
- Hourly rates that vary greatly depending on the institution anywhere from $20-$80 (again with exceptions on either end), per hour, depending on experience. Often, you are paid more if you have a masters or a doctorate degree.
- Flexible hours, often determined by what you want to take on and by availability of students.
- The ability to teach at multiple universities or have your own private studios.
- Some access to university resources and funding
- Depending on the institution, invitations to be involved in governing bodies or administration such as faculty senate and committees.
- Sometimes no dedicated office space
What will your job duties be? 
As a full-time tenure track employee, you will most likely teach a full studio, 1-3 courses, or a combination of both. Courses that you may teach, again, depending on the needs of your program may include Diction (typically French, Italian, German, Latin, Spanish and Russian), Vocal literature, Vocal Pedagogy, Opera Workshop, Aural skills/Musicianship or Music Theory. Depending on the size of the program, you may be asked to teach any number of these courses, or only private applied lessons. Some institutions are looking for a few full-time positions wrapped in to one and you might also be asked to conduct choirs in addition to teaching private lessons and courses.
The students you teach can vary greatly depending on the program. You may be asked to teach vocal performance majors, music education majors, music therapy majors, and non-major students.
Lessons may be organized in to 50 minute sessions once a week or 2, 30-minute sessions twice a week. Many programs will also hold weekly studio classes, or vocal area or department meetings where the vocal instructor will work in a master class format with the students, or hold special topics discussions or classes.
Accompanist costs may be covered by the program, or students may be responsible to cover those costs. In some situations, the vocal instructor may be asked to accompany their students.
Other weekly duties may include faculty meetings, department meetings, and other committee meetings as assigned by the Dean’s office or department head.
If your school is a NASM accredited program, it will need to abide by the suggested teacher loads, so that means 18 contact hours. For private lessons, that means 1 student to 1 hour. For courses, that works differently, a course may be 3 contact hours for the course, or 2 contract hours for the course, but typically not 1:1 as with private instruction.
You will also be asked to assist with recruitment in some form. This may include judging competitions, listening to auditions, giving masterclasses, attending conferences, holding workshops, or teaching at summer festivals etc. It can vary wildly based on the needs of the department and the nature of your program.
You will also be expected to be active in some form as a performer both at the school and outside of the school in professional freelance opportunities. This is where it can get tricky for singers.
Other responsibilities will include serving on committees both in the school or department of music and possibly at the university level. These may be the type that meet every week, some every month, and some only once a semester.
Examples of these include curriculum committee, faculty senate, special events committees, budget committees, tenure review committees and many others. These don’t typically come with any sort of a load reduction or extra pay, they are expected service contributions as part of your job duties.
In addition, you will be serving on recital committees, usually comprised of the student’s personal studio teacher and 1 to 2 other members and a typically an outside member as well. You might serve in any of those roles. If you are a department or area head, that position is typically a 3 year appointment and may come with a slight pay raise or load reduction, possibly both. You will then be expected to attend department head meetings and other meetings with the Dean of the school as needed.
Other “seasonal” duties include reviewing applications or pre-screening materials for up coming auditions, sitting through evaluations or vocal juries at the end of the semester (some schools hold them only once a year), and writing letters of recommendation for students headed off to audition for graduate programs.
In some cases, you may also be asked to design content for a new course, or provide academic advising help to students.
As you can see, there is a great deal more to working in academia than just teaching weekly lessons.
What will a typical week look like?
This is where you have quite a bit of flexibility was a studio teacher. Though the courses are structured in such a way that they are set every academic year, you are usually free to structure and schedule your private lessons as you wish, pending available studio space (if you don’t have your own dedicated office), and the availability of pianists.
Depending on your studio size, you can front load your week so that you have a light day, or no lesson on Friday, which can also be gig friendly, especially for concert gigs. It’s sometimes possible to do the same thing on the other side and keep Monday open then teach heavily Tuesday through Friday.
You’ll most likely have some kind of an area or department meeting weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, again depending on the size of the department or area.
In addition, most schools hold at least one master class for students or studio class, or both, on a weekly basis, so you’ll have to keep that open in your schedule.
Keep in mind that during “recital season” which is usually the latter part of spring semester, those students who have recitals will all be giving them virtually at the same time, so your weekends and evenings will also be filled with recital hearings, dress rehearsals and the recitals themselves.
What happens when I’m out of town for a gig?
Often, outside of the vocal world, instrumentalists have professional engagements that typically do not go beyond a 3 week consecutive time period at most. Those are also rare and usually involve some kind of extended tour or residency, or something to that effect. Often times, a week, or a weekend, is standard for a professional gig.
For singers, a standard opera gig will typically last a minimum of 3 weeks, and can go 2+ months depending on the length of the run. That’s a problem as the semester is 12-14 weeks long. What do you do? You’ll be working closely with your department head or dean to figure out strategies and solutions, but here are some of the more commonly-used solutions for actively performing teachers.
- Bring in a sub. This can be problematic as the university may need to sign off on your temporary replacement first. You’ll also have to pay this person out of your own pocket. However, it can allow you to go and do a gig and give your students good exposure to another working professional who may be in between gigs.
- Make-up lessons before and after you go. This is the method I use most often. Often students want a few extra lessons at the beginning and end of the semester. I send out a google doc and let them sign up first come, first serve, for all available lesson times on any given week.
- Ask your colleagues to fill in for you on a few lessons, then fill in for them when they are out of town. This can work well but is often hard to coordinate as a direct trade, lesson for lesson.
- Skype Lessons are becoming increasingly more common now, and in fact, a number of professional vocal instructors and coaches, especially in the commercial music side of things use this option regularly. Drawbacks are that you can easily wear your voice out on your only day off or before or after rehearsals and performances.
You may be able to come up with some other solutions or a 
combination of all of these options above, but be ready for that part. In my opinion, it’s one of the most complicated parts of the job as the gigs, student loads, and calendars can vary wildly from semester to semester.
Alright, these are the basics of the job. What other questions do you have about working in academia?
Say that all sounds fine and good, now how do you find a job?
Hundreds of overly-qualified musicians are knocking on academia’s door every year. In our current job market for a full time tenure-track position, you’ll need to have a doctorate before they will even look at you, with few exceptions.
Those exceptions are at private universities and if you only want to teach adjunct. For most adjunct positions, a masters degree will make you a great deal more competitive and as mentioned earlier, increase your earning power.
As most postings are online now, the best way to find these jobs is of course through online resources, social media and word of mouth. Here are my favorite places to find academic postings:
This is my personal favorite of all options of which I’m aware. You will be looking for the “music vacancies list” here on this website. Access requires the purchase of a year membership, but in my opinion, is well worth the money. Many postings that do not appear on other websites appear here, and the listings are reliable, current, and substantial. You won’t waste your time sifting through postings that have expired and incorrect or inaccurate information.
A good database. It allows you some flexibility in terms of searching not only for vocal positions but those closely related. Thought the information might not be as up to date and current as in other databases, it’s a free database and worth a look if you are actively searching for an academic posting.
Another good resource, similar to Higher Ed Jobs. This one also comes with more of a community element where where you can often find discussion points and topics about academia such as getting tenure, syllabi, grading, and the politics of the academic work place. A good resource.
Those of you actively looking for academic positions, what are your favorite sources of information? What do you recommend people avoid?
If you haven’t run screaming and scheduled 10 more auditions since you’ve started reading, academia might be the place for you. What are some things you need to watch out for though? Academia isn’t always what it may seem from the instructor/performer hybrid vantage point.
- Be careful when you see a salary listed. Often the school has factored in the cost of benefits and retirement contributions that you’ll receive. For example, your salary may be listed as 70,000 but your base pay might be 40,000. That’s admittedly a more extreme scenario, but it can and does happen. Make sure you know what your base, take-home pay is, without any of the factored in benefits.
- If you are considering accepting a job at a university, think back to your potential colleagues whom you met during the interview process. To the best of your knowledge, did they seem supportive about you actively performing? Are other faculty members out performing as well?
- Are your job duties unrealistic? Sometimes out of the spontaneous joy and relief when receiving that offer, we accept that job for $30k a year, but don’t read the fine print in the posting. You may be a department head, tenure-track, instructor who is also expected to teach all of the core classes as well as a full compliment of students. Some of those types of jobs are tremendously rewarding, and others can be unhealthy. Things to watch out for in a posting that looks unrealistic include: You might be teaching in overload (more students than you should have). You may have a limit on how long you can be gone each semester. You may be solely in charge of recruitment and auditioning and placing students in studios as well. It can be the work load of 3 full-time individuals at some schools. You may also be asked to lead the choir and as mentioned above, teach theory, history or musicianship. Great if you can do that, but for the number of hours you’ll be working, is it worth it? Maybe, for the benefits alone, but maybe not.
Bottom Line: Academia is a fantastic place to work, but do your research first and know what you are getting in to. Many situations end badly because either the instructor or the institution doesn’t understand what’s expected. Often, this results in either an unhealthy situation for you or the institution, or a high turnover rate in that position.
In future posts, we’ll be talking about other academia-related topics such as a CV (vs. a resume), Tenure Criteria and how to prepare now for tenure, good places to sing if yo teach a lot, and discovering what kind of a scenario you need to truly be an active singer and performer.
