Balancing Acts: Coordination Difficulties in Harvard's Music Dual Degree Programs

For students seeking a more in-depth education in music during their time at the College, Harvard offers two programs that allow students to take music classes while completing bachelor’s degrees at Harvard: The Harvard-New England Conservatory program and the Harvard-Berklee Dual Degree program.

“I felt as though a conservatory would be the best place for me to thrive musically,” says Raghav Mehrotra ’26, a student currently enrolled in the Harvard-Berklee program. “But at the same time, I wanted a place where I could explore everything else that I'm interested in.”

Though dual enrollment students value the opportunity to combine studying music with their other academic interests, they also cite issues with the structures of their programs. Students say that there are difficulties with coordinating schedules between the two schools, transportation costs and financial aid, and feeling socially disconnected.

The Harvard-NEC program is a five-year dual degree program that allows a student to earn a bachelor’s degree at Harvard and a master’s of music at the New England Conservatory. For the first three years of college, students enroll at Harvard full-time while taking studio instruction courses and participating in ensembles at NEC.

During their fourth year, they complete their Harvard graduation requirements and begin to fulfill their master’s coursework. After graduating from Harvard, students enroll full-time at NEC for a fifth year to finish their master’s degree.

The Harvard-NEC program is the smaller of Harvard’s two dual degree programs, with around 10 enrollees per class, and focuses primarily on classical music.

While the Harvard-Berklee Program does not explicitly guarantee a degree at the conclusion of the program, it does allow students to take courses, receive private instruction, and participate in ensembles at Berklee while working toward a bachelor’s degree at Harvard. Students then have the option of applying to Berklee’s master’s program.

Around 70 students actively participate in the Harvard-Berklee degree program, taking advantage of Berklee’s contemporary and jazz offerings.

Harvard’s dual degree programs aim to give students the opportunity to pursue a liberal arts education and rigorous musical instruction at the same time.

“The idea was to pair with both of these institutions to give students a pathway to a much more thorough, much more advanced music performance experience,” says Peter Charig, Harvard’s undergraduate music program coordinator.

Mehrotra says this interdisciplinary focus is why he enrolled in the program. He initially planned on only applying to Berklee, but wanted to take advantage of Harvard’s focus on music theory and economics as well as Berklee’s emphasis on performance.

Music classes at Harvard, Mehrotra says, “focus more on history and culture, and the societal impact of music that we’re studying.” Berklee classes, in comparison, tend to focus on performance.

Mehrotra hopes to work in music but is not sure whether he wants to pursue business or performance.

“I’d kind of like to have my toes in every creative pool, whether that’s pure music itself, or performance, or music directing,” Mehrotra says.

Crimson Magazine editor Chelsie Lim ’26, a student in the NEC Master’s program, also values the range provided by the combined program’s interdisciplinary approach. She says the dual degree’s interdisciplinary focus takes the edge off pursuing music professionally. She likes the program because it allows her to study performance “without necessarily having the pressure of, ‘what gig am I going to do next? How am I going to make a career purely out of performance?’”

Many students use the program to explore concentrations other than music while at Harvard, pursuing degrees with little intersection. Noah J. Eckstein ’26, a Harvard-Berklee student, studies Physics at Harvard and production at Berklee with a focus on film scoring.

“These are two different areas that I am very interested in, potentially seeking a career in,” Eckstein says. “I guess ‘normally’ I would have to decide which one I would go to for school. And with this program, I can have my cake and eat it too.”

As students navigate these different campuses and student cultures, they have the freedom to decide their level of involvement at each school. While Harvard-NEC students take one studio course per semester, students in the Berklee program design their own schedules, choosing up to six Berklee credits.

According to Mehrotra, Berklee’s music scene is “more free-flowing” compared to Harvard’s, where creative extracurriculars tend to be more structured and individualized. At Berklee, students often perform sets at a jazz club, Wally’s. “Everybody’s playing with different groups every week, and everybody’s just collaborating to make mistakes,” he says. “I love that part.”

Kaia Berman Peters ’24-’25, a Harvard-NEC student, notes that while NEC is a preprofessional school and Harvard is not, “the cultures are the opposite. People at Harvard are a lot more focused on their careers and their future, and getting the internships that will allow them to pave the way toward their future.”

“It’s a lot more forward-oriented, whereas NEC is a lot more interested in the music itself,” she says.

Yet the programs’ high level of freedom brings its own shortcomings. Students, especially in the Berklee program, encounter difficulties balancing their commitments to two institutions.

“We do have the ability to just kind of mold our programs the way we want to do things, which in some ways is great. I love it, right?” Eckstein says. He notices, however, that many Harvard-Berklee students tend to overload their schedules.

“A lot of the Harvard-Berklee students center their Berklee schedules around their Harvard schedules,” Mehrotra says, explaining that this can make it hard to coordinate their Berklee class. “A lot of us missed out on the classes we wanted to take and we had to email professors and go through long, winding paths to find classes and schedules that would work for us.”

The programs are also relatively small, and participants make up a minority of students at all three schools. As a result, many advisors are unaware of their needs.

“There isn’t too much of a community or too much external support specific to the program,” Lim says. She meets with individual academic advisors at both NEC and Harvard, “but there’s not one single mentor who is completely familiar with what it’s actually like to be in both environments.”

In addition to advising support, many dual enrollment students feel disconnected from campus socially. “A lot of people who are in the dual degree program don’t have as much access to NEC community life,” Berman Peters says.

Lim describes her enrollment at NEC as “a main extracurricular, but an extracurricular nonetheless.”

“It’s hard to commit as much time as I would like to practicing and engaging with the community,” she says.

To address this disconnect, Hixon C. Foster ’25, a Music concentrator, moved off-campus to live closer to Berklee. “It feels like the program is already oriented towards Harvard already,” he says. “And so I figured to be in the more performing scene in Boston, around a bunch of musicians, it would be helpful to live over at Berklee.”

Richard J. Giarusso, Dean of Academic Affairs at NEC, says the school aims to foster a community among dual degree students. By bringing students together, he hopes to “find ways of better integrating their work and building a greater awareness for their work in both campus communities.”

NEC is also modifying its advising network to make the transition between being a full-time Harvard student and a fifth-year NEC master’s student “more seamless,” Giarusso says.

“It’s a big swing,” he adds. “We’re thinking about how we might better navigate that transition point to get students better prepared for making that pivot.”

Obtaining a dual degree is often expensive as well as hard to navigate. Transportation between schools is not subsidized, forcing students to pay travel costs out-of-pocket. Getting between campuses can pose a significant financial barrier to those in the program, especially students who travel between schools multiple days each week.

The issue of cost is compounded by a lack of coordination between schools’ financial aid programs. Eckstein feels Harvard-Berklee students don’t have a standardized place in either university’s financial aid program, which makes coordinating with the financial aid office “rather frustrating.” Aid offices often aren’t aware of students’ dual enrollment status, and are sometimes unable to answer questions specific to the programs.

Students in the Harvard-Berklee program pay Harvard’s standard tuition and a flat fee of $4,000 to take courses at Berklee. As a result, individual participants can pay hugely disproportionate amounts for their Berklee coursework.

“I can take one singular class at Berklee and still pay for the entire semester’s worth of classes, or take five classes separately and still pay that much,” Mehrotra says. The Berklee administration says they reduce tuition by the same percentage as Harvard offers dual degree students.

In response to student concerns, Berklee is restructuring their program. This application cycle marks the first year students will apply to the joint studies program instead of a Harvard-Berklee dual degree, though they may still pursue a master’s degree at Berklee.

Many Harvard-Berklee students opt not to work toward a master’s degree, instead using the program to supplement their Harvard coursework with Berklee classes. Charig hopes reframing the program as an opportunity for joint studies instead of a path to a master’s will help “treat the program more as it’s being used.”

The program remains essentially the same as it was — students enroll at Harvard full-time with the option to take coursework and private lessons at Berklee. Participants will not receive a degree from Berklee, but will still have the option to apply into Berklee’s master’s program after graduation.

This transition will also make it easier for Harvard and Berklee to coordinate their graduation requirements and financial aid packages, as well as to transfer credits between schools. Additionally, Berklee is considering moving from having students pay a flat fee for all coursework to a more proportional pay-by-credit system.

These changes are still ongoing, and complications remain. The initiatives have yet to address travel costs, and the work of balancing doubled course loads is still an issue.

“People have their frustrations with the program,” says Eckstein. “I have my frustrations,”. Yet he sees hope in the Harvard-Berklee program, and believes the recent restructuring initiatives are important steps towards improvement.

“The people who go into this program really, really want to do this program because it gives us unique things that we cannot get anywhere else,” he says. “There’s a lot of potential in this program to be above and beyond just incredible.”

— Magazine Writer Maeve T. Brennan can be reached at maeve.brennan@thecrimson.com.

—Magazine writer Adelaide E. Parker can be reached at adelaide.parker@thecrimson.com. Follow her @adelaide_prkr.