UNT College of Music aims to enhance core strengths with new strategic plan

As part of aligning with the university’s Better Look North: UNT 2030 plan , the College of Music aims to replace aging facilities, revise degree plans and improve time to value in its five-year strategic plan . In addition to these goals, the college also hopes to increase revenue production by maintaining graduate student enrollment and increasing the virtual lessons offered to students in Dallas ISD and Jasper ISD. As a result of these changes, the College of Music hopes to increase four-year graduation rates by 20% and six-year graduation rates by 12%. They also hope to change time to value from 13 years to 10 years, according to the college’s online implementation plan. Degree reductions and time to value As part of its strategic plan, the College of Music is revising its curriculum to reduce the amount of time and money it takes for students to earn their degree. To create the new plan, the college had multiple meetings with faculty leadership, the staff advisory committee, student advisory committee and the advancement board to ensure the new initiatives made sense for the college. “I think that there are certainly strong suits of the program,” said second-year composition master’s student Barrett Allen. “Last semester, one of the on-campus orchestras read through an orchestra piece that I had written. ... I think that those hands-on experiences are really beneficial for students, and I would hope that they are here to stay even after I'm gone.” During this revision, they reduced the number of degrees they offer to six — a Bachelor of Arts degree, Bachelor of Music degree, Master of Arts degree, Master of Music degree, a Doctor of Musical Arts degree and a Ph.D. Each degree will have an emphasis in parentheses, such as the Bachelor of Music (Commercial Music – Music Business). When cutting the degrees, Richmond said he and the multiple committees determined the essential courses. Part of the goals with these revisions was to meet the university’s outlined standards in its overall strategic plan of a time to value median of six years. Time to value measures how soon, on average, it takes for graduates to earn back the cost of their education. As of now, the COM has a median time to value of 13 years, and on its online implementation plan, it states they are hoping to decrease this to 10 years. Richmond, however, said the main goal is to just decrease the number in general. When determining time to value metrics, Richmond said the university only pulled IRS W-2 data in Texas. However, Richmond added that because many musicians are entrepreneurs, taking music gigs and other work, they are not fully represented in W-2 data. To get an accurate time-to-value metric for the COM, Richmond said the data has to be pulled from W-2 data nationally, as well as IRS Form 1099 data. After pulling the 1099 data separately, Richmond said it is hard to fit the College of Music into the time-to-value metric due to the range of careers graduates can go into. “We have the most prolific music teacher education program in the country,” Richmond said. “There are multiple job offers for every single graduate as they're walking out the door. But we have a lot of students who are professional artists, professional performers, composers, innovators and content creators [who are] devoutly ignored by a W-2 metric confined to Texas.” Richmond said looking past alumni in Texas allowed the college to get a more accurate representation of the time it took for musicians to get the value of their education. Other music colleges with an accreditation from the National Association of Schools of Music, such as The Juilliard School, have an average return on investment of 12.8 years. This calculation stems from taking in Juilliard’s total in-state tuition of $180,396 over four years and dividing the average first-year salary after graduation of $14,067, according to Niche. Degree revisions In addition to reducing the number of degrees offered, Richmond said he has taken the average time it takes for students to get their Ph.D. from eight to three years by reducing the 60 needed credit hours to 48. He said the college did so by determining the “essential” courses needed to earn a doctorate. For the music composition degree, the reduction was achieved through making “related field” requirements optional. This process will be completed in 2028. The related field component of the degree includes a graduate student taking classes in a field separate from their own, but related. For example, a trumpet performance graduate student could take a conducting track as a related field. Richmond said the decrease in time is also due to degree completion mapping and conversations with faculty about the time it took to earn a Ph.D after a master’s degree. “[We didn’t want to] lower our standards, because in our mission statement, we oblige ourselves to excellence, integrity and imagination,” Richmond said. “But maybe this was the opportunity to lead into that imaginative time. We looked at those programs, and we started with the doctorates." As a student in the College of Music, Allen said he does not think the reduction of time it takes to complete a postgraduate degree is beneficial. “One of the primary benefits that you get from a degree is your private study and your time spent collaborating with peers and performers from the College of Music,” Allen said. “In that sense, cutting down the number of years it takes to get a Ph.D is just denying the students the opportunities that other Tier 1 music schools across the country take pride in and work very hard to supply for their students.” As of now for the composition masters degree, students have to take a “related field” component in order to graduate. With the requirement changes, related fields will become optional. Allen said he supports this change as he feels related fields are currently set up very “scattered and distant” due to unclear definitions and lack of advising. He said taking away the related field would change very little about the main takeaways from his degree. “I think that the infrastructure that exists in order to make [related fields] relevant to the degree plan are lacking in polish that some of the core foundational elements of the degree plan that typical composition courses already have,” Allen said. “I don't feel that my related field is as necessary or productive as my core classes.” Reconstructing facilities The third part of their strategic plan is the replacement of old facilities. Right now, the College of Music is made up of five buildings — the Music Building, Music Practice North, Music Practice South, the Music Annex and Bain Hall. Richmond said he hopes to replace Bain Hall, the Music Annex and Music Practice North and South for more practice space, better acoustics and improved sound isolation. Richmond said the college is in the process of drafting a reconstruction plan and wants to present it to the UNT Board of Regents in 2027. As of now, the timeline, budget and plans for the buildings are unknown. Richmond shared the same sentiment to the North Texas Daily in 2019 that the college has been trying to add additional practice space and renovate its buildings. “The university has known for a long time that our growing program is making use of every nook and cranny that we have and we're grateful for it,” Richmond said in 2019. “But they know it's not sufficient.” Music Practice North, Music Practice South and Bain Hall were converted from dormitories to practice rooms, while the Music Annex was converted from an elementary school to a practice hall and an instrument repair center. Because the buildings weren’t originally intended to be music buildings, the college has had trouble getting reaccredited, Richmond said. During the accreditation process around three years ago, Richmond said everything was accepted except the music buildings. Richmond said the universi