Music Education Statistics
Music education statistics typically are used for music advocacy to others less familiar with our field. Presenting external correlations (often mistaken as cause/effect relations) to administrators is a popular tactic amongst music educators who seek to show the value that music education has on other academic areas. Increasingly, as budgets become smaller in school districts, and federal and state governments look for ways to trim funding for non-essential items, many arts advocates seek to present information that shows how the arts stimulate the economy and provide for higher quality of life. For further comments and quotes from leaders about the importance of music education, I encourage you to visit the music education quotes page.
The Economy and Jobs:
- The arts produce jobs, generating an estimate $37 billion with a return of $3.4 billion in federal income taxes. (American Arts Alliance Fact Sheet)
- “The arts are an economic plus; second only to aerospace as our most lucrative national export.” (Michael Greene of The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences)
- “Making music can help reduce job burnout and improve your mood,” according to a study exposing 112 long-term care workers to six recreational music-making sessions of group drumming and keyboard accompaniment. (Advances in Mind-Body Medicine)
- The foremost technical designers and engineers in Silicon Valley are almost all practicing musicians. (Dee Dickinson, Music and the Mind, 1993)
External Correlations and Academic Benefits:
- “Students with coursework/experience in music performance and music appreciation scored higher on the SAT: students in music performance scored 57 points higher on the verbal and 41 points higher on the math, and students in music appreciation scored 63 points higher on verbal and 44 points higher on the math, than did students with no arts participation”. (College-Bound Seniors National Report: Profile of SAT Program Test Takers. Princeton, NJ: The College Entrance Examination Board, 2001)
- Lewis Thomas, physician and biologist, found that music majors comprise the highest percentage of accepted medical students at 66%. (“The Case for Music in the Schools,” Phi Delta Kappan, February 1994.)
- Music lessons, and even simply listening to music, can enhance spatial reasoning performance, a critical higher-brain function necessary to perform complex tasks including mathematics. (Frances Rauscher, Ph.D., Gordon Shaw, Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, 1994)
- 78% of Americans feel learning a musical instrument helps students perform better in other subjects. (Gallup Poll, “American Attitudes Toward Music,” 2003)
Health Benefits:
- “Playing music increases human growth hormone [HgH] production among active older Americans. A study following 130 people over two 10-week periods measured participants’ levels of HgH. The findings revealed that the test group who took group keyboard lessons showed significantly higher levels of HgH than the control group people who did not make music. (University of Miami)
- “Students who participate in school band or orchestra have the lowest levels of current and lifelong use of alcohol, tobacco and illicit drugs among any group in our society,” (H. Con. Res. 266, United States Senate, 2000)
- College-age musicians are emotionally healthier than their non-musician counterparts forperformance anxiety, emotional concerns and alcohol-related problems. (Houston Chronicle, 1998)
