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Career Growth and Longevity for Higher Education Music Faculty

The key to long-term career growth is to align your “what,” your “why” and the work-life integration you want.

As a third-generation music educator, I grew up witnessing the wide range of emotional swings that this career could yield. At one end of the spectrum, I experienced joy, recognition and a sense of purpose every time my students achieved at the highest levels. At the other end, I felt frustration, anger and overwhelm from constant curricular, administrative and other external pressures.

When I decided to pursue music education as a career, I perceived having a huge advantage because I knew exactly what I was getting myself into. However, even with knowing all that came with the job and having family and colleagues to lean on for commiseration and support, I found myself completely burned out after teaching high school band for five years. I loved what I did, but health issues, recurring hospital visits and missed time on the job had me and my loved ones concerned for my long-term physical and mental well-being.

A Prophetic Meeting and a New Outlook

During this time, I was also completing my Ph.D., and I was so fortunate to have had an impactful meeting with my dissertation advisor that changed my view of my career path. I was researching music teacher burnout and attrition. As I frustratingly explained my health challenges, I admitted that I felt like a fraud for studying a phenomenon that I was falling victim to. My advisor recommended, “Instead of studying why teachers leave the profession, maybe consider what makes them stay.”

My outlook instantly and completely changed! I decided to focus more on restorative-based career outcomes, which led to my dissertation, “Predictors of Instrumental Music Teacher Job Satisfaction” (Bryant, 2012).

Since then, I have been passionate about music teacher career growth and longevity. Higher education music faculty, in particular, occupy one of the most complex professional roles in the academy. Unlike other disciplines in higher education that prioritize research and large-dollar grant funding, music faculty must also excel in classroom instruction, music theory, musicology, applied instruction, ensemble leadership, scholarship, technology innovation, academic advising, recruitment, and service to both the institution and community. All this is considered “just part of our workload!”

Similar to our K-12 colleagues, this intensity creates profound intrinsic fulfillment and significant burnout risk. What I have found in my experience is that career growth and longevity cannot be left to happenstance. Now more than ever, we must curate our own career journey by knowing our why, aligning our purpose to a matching institutional mission and work-life integration.

Understanding Our Passion

Job satisfaction in any career begins with understanding our passion, which drives us on a deep level. But, our career fulfillment over time cannot survive on passion alone. Most music faculty enter higher education because of their love and dedication to their art, but many often leave when they find that there is a lack of balance between the time commitment of the many other facets of the job and what they actually want to be doing: Making music. Add in lack of compensation, mounting administrative tasks and an underappreciation for the value they bring to the institution, and it is easy to see why so many become dismayed so quickly.

One of the main factors behind my “why” stems from a desire to improve systems within institutions so that students can improve their chances at success. We are all familiar with the common cliché “look to your left, look to your right – one of them will not make it to the end of this year.” I was shocked and frustrated to see many of my peers in undergrad not persist in pursuing higher education after the first few semesters. However, unlike the cliché suggests, it was not their lack of academic readiness or inability to better manage their time that led them to drop out. Oftentimes, it was communication breakdowns between financial aid, housing, advising, the registrar’s office, the bursar’s office or some other administrative unit on campus that caused missed deadlines and loss of educational funding.

My desire to improve these systems is what led me to not only teach in higher ed, but also to advise students and serve as a liaison between these different units to advocate for student success. Every career decision I have made since entering higher education, including each job opportunity I have declined, was based on understanding how my passion and purpose are aligned with the mission of the institution.

A Second Aha Moment

Many of my fondest memories — and my most intense frustrations — came out of my undergraduate experience at a Historically Black College and University (HBCU). I am driven by wanting those same powerful learning experiences for my students, while mitigating the frustrations as best I can. This is what led me to want to pursue working at an HBCU.

While this personal alignment to a specific type of institution seems like an obvious decision now, I was initially hesitant to work at an HBCU. I thought that I would not be able to have as significant an impact as I wanted because most systems are slow to change. And, personally, I carried some resentment toward my alma mater earlier in my career over some administrative things that I had endured, which could have been easily avoided.

However, one day, I was having a debate with a colleague, who was also an HBCU alum, about why things had not improved after all these years, and they challenged me to “be the change” that I wanted to see. Another aha moment!

This second change in perspective led me to the possibility of teaching at an institution where I felt my impact could be most significant. At this point, the alignment between the “what,” which for me is music teacher preparation, and the “why” of improving minority student outcomes, came into focus in a profound and meaningful way.

Work-Life Integration

Central to all of this, however, was how my work was integrated into the rest of my life. As musicians, we work non-traditional schedules that stray from the typical 9-to-5 and often include many evening and weekend activities. Evening rehearsals, weekend performances and travel obligations can complicate family dynamics and place a great deal of stress on the family unit (Croysdale, 2025). There is some emerging research that supports what I call work-life integration, though it may also be referred to as work-life balance or work-life sustainability.

Research by Gooding (2018) found that faculty who perceived greater autonomy and clearer expectations reported stronger intentions to remain in the profession. Examples of this include negotiating release time, expectations for service on committees, and flexible class scheduling among other issues. Similarly, Cha and Amrein-Beardsley (2024) found that early career and non-tenure-track music education faculty experienced significantly higher stress. We all know that institutional climate in general and departmental culture specifically can have a major impact on faculty stress. Still, we should consider how we can maximize our benefits (mental health, sabbatical, professional development grants and other forms of faculty development) to improve our well-being and move our career forward.

These findings also align with broader higher education research that indicates how autonomy, collegiality and mission alignment are central to faculty satisfaction (Gee & Konner, 2025). I know that tenure-track positions like mine are few and far between in higher education today, but there are still benefits that come with all faculty jobs that we can leverage to reach our career and life integration goals.

small college class with professor at front of class

Make Your Higher Education Career Sustainable

We in the music faculty ranks often begin our careers with a wealth of prior experience in other sectors, and we are drawn to this work because of our artistic commitment and pedagogical passion. We truly believe in the power that teaching and performing at the highest level can transform lives and communities. However, longevity in the profession is shaped by how well our professional identity aligns with workload expectations, opportunities for advancement, personal obligations, compensation, administrative support and more. From personal experience, I can attest that the evidence is clear: A sustainable career in higher education is not simply the product of grit, luck or some combination of a number of intangibles. It is the result of being open, intentional, understanding your why and pursuing opportunities that are best aligned to the work-life integration you desire to have.