Good afternoon, let me begin by welcoming all of you, faculty, staff, and students, to the start of the 2024-25 Academic Year. It is always so great to have everyone back and see the campus busy again.
I want to offer a special welcome to those of you who are new to Peabody: students, faculty, and staff. I hope you will find Peabody to be an inspiring and welcoming community. We are so glad you are here.
I want to take a moment and thank Annie Fullard and her Cavani String Quartet colleagues for their performance and add a special welcome to Annie, to Peabody. Thanks also to CJ Li and Yang Gao for your thoughtful comments and wonderful performance. We are a place of performance and so it is both fitting and uplifting to kick off the academic year with art – thank you all!
Also, if I may, a bit of housekeeping – I want to invite everyone to join us for lunch on the Plaza immediately following Convocation. This will be a nice opportunity to visit, to greet old friends and to make new ones.
So, I want to set the stage by noting that as many of you know, we have been growing. Peabody has seen unprecedented enrollment growth of 40% over the past seven years, topping 800 students last year. By design, that growth will now slow this year but will still top 825 students. And all 825 of you were admitted based on an increasingly competitive audition process—in fact, Peabody’s selectivity for the incoming class went from accepting nearly one-half of a highly qualified and competitive audition pool – roughly one out of two applicants, to accepting a little more than one out of three. Thanks in part to our ability to now meet full need with no loans for qualifying undergraduates—a momentous change we announced last February—we expect that selectivity to continue to improve over the next few years making it even more competitive. Similarly, our yield – the percentage of students who accept our offer of admission – increased to its highest level historically, and we expect that number to continue to rise over the next few audition cycles. Because selectivity and yield are strong indicators of excellence, this is very good news. With the new financial aid and other improvements to what we offer, Peabody is getting increasingly competitive which translates to outstanding students, and a much more diverse community. This year’s undergraduate entering class is a record 25% underrepresented students, compared to 18% last year.
In fact, increasing access was a central driver of our efforts to meet full need. Here too, there is positive news to report. The number of students eligible for Pell grants and the number of FLI students – which includes those who are the first generation in their family to attend college – have increased by seven and six percentage points, respectively. These are key measures of socioeconomic diversity. So, with this entering undergraduate class, in addition to being more competitive, Peabody students are now more reflective of our wider society than ever before. And I am also excited to reiterate that Bloomberg Philanthropies most recent, generous gift to Johns Hopkins University to support need-based graduate financial aid will also infuse additional funds into aspects of our graduate financial aid program in the future, making a Peabody education attainable for even more aspiring artists.
To our students, the bottom line is that whatever your circumstances, you have really worked hard to earn your spot here, and I want to see each of you make the very most of your time at Peabody. So, what does that look like?
It means you will work hard, practice and excel in your discipline. That is important and so much of the reason you are here. You want to build the strongest core skills you can. And you have one of the best faculties in the world to help you do that. In addition, I hope you will also experience as much as you can across campus and in the community. If you’re a performer, go out of your way to work with a composer; if you’re a composer, collaborate with a dancer; learn how to create and advance new ideas; get involved with a research project and explore the connection between the performing arts and health; explore the dynamics of arts institutions and arts in our lives today. Start to understand at a deeper level the field you are going into so that you can really shape the future of the performing arts. And challenge yourself to think about how you will use your artistic voice to reach people and change the world.
Artists are taught to think about what it means to be an artist in generally conventional ways – from the orchestra or opera stage, on the dance floor, the idea that perfected performance is the ultimate contribution. That is indeed one wonderful aspect of being an artist. At the same time, you may discover in your future artistic lives that you touch people in ways never imagined.
I’m thinking of our LAUNCHPad grants that we awarded just a few months ago and vocalist Ryan Alexander whose project “Peabody at the DC Jail” will pair incarcerated scholars with poets, composers and performers from Johns Hopkins University and Peabody to collaborate on original poems and songs for voice and piano.
Or there is Olina Kilbury’s New Contemporary Tonality Collective founded as a consortium of composers to empower the creation of broadly tonal contemporary music through composition, performance, and discussion with ambitions to create, curate and disseminate that work to a broad public.
Another example is Bianca Quigley’s design and creation of an analog steel slide bar oscillator envisioned as a new instrument that expands the compositional landscape in the world of electronic music.
And we have students who are participating in Peabody’s Sound Rounds program bringing music to patients and staff throughout the Johns Hopkins Health System.
What I am saying is that you have a unique opportunity—in fact, countless opportunities—at the oldest and one of the most forward-looking conservatories in the world – and as a student of Johns Hopkins University — to do all kinds of things that will make you a better, more connected, more creative, innovative, and ultimately, more viable artist. Make the most of your time here by taking advantage of every opportunity to grow.
With that, I want to wish everyone here a great start to the year, a prosperous and productive semester, and I look forward to seeing everyone around the campus. Please join us for lunch, have a great rest of the day and start of the semester.