The Meritocracy Myth is an active working paper examining structural inequality in the U.S. orchestral labor market by linking the supply of specialized musical training to demand-side hiring in professional orchestras. The project draws on a large, original dataset that combines national postsecondary degree completions with detailed biographical information on thousands of professional orchestral musicians, allowing for a systematic analysis of how training pathways translate—or fail to translate—into elite employment outcomes.

Using this data, the paper shows that a small number of highly prestigious institutions disproportionately supply musicians to the most competitive orchestral positions, despite awarding a minority of overall performance degrees. These patterns suggest that orchestral careers operate less as open meritocratic markets and more as prestige-stratified labor systems, where access, cost, and institutional affiliation strongly shape who enters, who advances, and who exits the field.

This project is ongoing, and I am actively expanding the dataset. I welcome participation from professional musicians interested in self-reporting educational and career histories, institutions willing to share aggregate or contextual data, and research partners interested in collaboration, replication, or extension of this work. The goal is to build a transparent, field-facing body of evidence that treats orchestral careers as a workforce development problem as much as an artistic one.