While the School of Music will not be changing the amount of money it distribute for scholarships, it will be changing the packaging of scholarships.
In the past, scholarships for those wanting to go to the School of Music were stacked, meaning they received a merit scholarship from the College of Liberal Arts in addition to a performance award from the School of Music.
Now, School of Music students will have the option of taking the School of Music performance scholarship, which will include the amount from the College of Liberal Arts in it, or taking the merit scholarship from the College of Liberal Arts, which will by its nature be less than the performance scholarship.
For freshman Richard Brown, the decision to change from the School of Music to the College of Liberal Arts next year wasn't an easy one, especially after learning that he would lose some of his scholarship money.
"I ended up losing $4,000 of my overall scholarship," Brown said. "To gain $3,000 of it back, I will be taking clarinet lessons and will be playing in the band."
Brown will be taking out loans to cover the difference and working in order to help immediately pay the loan off. Brown thinks that the difficulty for most students to make up this difference leads students to double major in order to study both and keep their scholarships to remain at DePauw.
"Normally, it doesn't work out this well," Brown said. "For most students, they primarily have a music scholarship, and when they try to switch over, they won't give them an academic scholarship. If they switch out of the School of Music, they would be losing everything."
The main difference is the number of scholarships being reduced to only one, but the monetary value is the same as before. As far as Dani Weatherford, director of admissions at DePauw, understands it, this move makes the School of Music scholarship breakdown more similar to the competing conservatories.
"There's been a change in the way that we award performance awards, not necessarily a change to the dollar amount," Weatherford said.
According to Weatherford, the old model was confusing for families. Sometimes the scholarships would not come out all at once because they dealt with different offices.
"The problem with [the old model] is some people thought their music scholarship was being short changed because they were smart," Mark McCoy, dean of the School of Music, said. "In the end the same student got the same amount of money. It's just that when we made our decisions, we didn't take into consideration what the [College of Liberal Arts] was doing."
For students who wish to change from the School of Music to the College of Liberal Arts, the effects of what happens will remain the same. They will be able to still maintain some of their scholarships.
"We have records of what they were offered in their merit award as a student at the College of Liberal Arts," Weatherford said. "They will keep their merit award as it was awarded to them as a freshman."
In fact, these students also have the ability to maintain some of the performance scholarship as well.
"If students are strong enough performers that they can make it into our ensembles, then we offer scholarships to CLA students to perform in SOM ensembles," McCoy said. "That's the same no matter what your major is."