[mmcclimon]

Music departments tend to be expensive in terms of faculty, sine most of their time is spent in private lessons. If an oboe studio has 10 students, that's essentially 10 hours a week in lessons alone. In that same 10 hours, an English professor might teach 60 students (if you figure 15 students/class with 2 hours MWF and a different 30 students Tue./Thu.). Those are numbers for a small school; at larger universities an English professor might lecture to 300 students a week in 10 hours, but that oboe professor is still seeing just 10 students.

[mgkimsal]

Huh? Are you talking about college? I thought the OP was talking about high school. We never had any private lessons. "Band" class was... 35+ kids in one room at a time, all playing at the same time. Band was almost always the largest single class I had, relative only to gym class. Sometimes gym was larger (40-50 at a time), but I think I had a year with more people in band class than in my pahys-ed class.