Well I'm going about applying to some schools, a couple Liberal Arts colleges and a couple music schools (have an audition at Berklee for vocal performance on December 10th). I'm also planning on applying to the New School. I looked at Columbia in Chicago and decided it wasn't really a location I wanted.

I figured this may be a good place to look for insight, maybe some people here attend these schools, or other schools that I might be interested in.

Or maybe this is just the wrong subforum entirely.

Places like Berklee and M.I. have the best faculties but anyone who's ever been there and anywhere else will tell you, they don't necessarily put out the best students or even have the best programs. They'll take anyone wiling to pay the $30,000 a semester. I got accepted into both with a resume however and no audition however, to get into Humber college in Toronto, you have to audition against 1000 other students and only 15-25 get accepted.

Every school is going to offer the same thing, an education. I'd go where you like the music scene the most. You're going to learn as much or more from being a part of the music scene itself as you will in 4 years of the classroom. Personally, I love the stuff coming out of Chicago, (Tortoise, The Sea and Cake, Chicago Under Ground, Isotope 217) so if I were going to go in the U.S., I'd consider any of the universities there that have the studies I'm most interested in. I would suggest you do the same.

I only really know a lot about the schools in Canada so I'll advise about that, in case you're interested. I went to Humber in and, don't get me wrong, you will get a very good music education, but you won't learn shit about anything else; their courses outside of the music spectrum are terrible. If you really want to be a great performer but you're not concerned about much else, Humber may be right up your alley. However, if you want to diversify a bit, McGill and to a lesser extent York and U of T have great jazz programs. For western art music, I couldn't tell you much, other than that Humber doesn't have a program for it and that York, U of T, UBC and McGill are all well-respected in the field.