Our impact

COS followed 673 of its students to find out what happened.

Most youth music programs describe their effect in adjectives. Between 1984 and 2025 COS tracked what actually happened to 673 children who came through the program, including the ones admitted on desire alone, whatever their family could pay.

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A graduate who came through COS · portrait, present day

The numbers

What happened to the children who sat in these chairs.

673

Students tracked between 1984 and 2025

100%

Went on to college

25%

Earned admission to Ivy League institutions

4 of 10

Faculty are COS alumni who came back to teach

Figures come from COS’s own tracking of program participants and are updated annually.

Where they went

The most common destinations.

Counts of tracked students admitted to each institution between 1984 and 2025.

Institution

Students

New York University

Cornell University

CUNY Queens College

Harvard University

SUNY Binghamton

Columbia University

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

SUNY Stony Brook

Princeton University

Yale University

Carnegie Mellon University

Brown University

Boston University

Dartmouth College

Johns Hopkins University

Alumni

Some of them stayed in music. Most did not.

That’s the point. A child who learns to hold a section together at eleven carries the habit into whatever they do at thirty. Alumni have earned the Avery Fisher Prize, Naumburg Awards, and the Young Artist International Award, and others went into medicine, broadcasting, diplomacy, and the law.

In music

Yo-Yo Ma, cellist and 19-time Grammy winner. Astrid Schween of the Juilliard Quartet. Jordan Bak, violist, who returned as soloist for the 50th Anniversary concert. Kevin Shue and Olivia Martinez, both now on the COS faculty.

Everywhere else

Caroline Kennedy, former U.S. Ambassador to Japan and Australia. Antony Rudel, Station Manager at WCRB-FM/WGBH in Boston. Rabbi Shira Stern, religious leader and community advocate.

Read the full history

I literally cried. I was overwhelmed, overcome by my own emotions. I could not believe that kids I had seen twenty years ago came back and played, and they were so good.

Michael Dadap, from the COS 50th Anniversary film

Where they played

Real stages, from the first season onward.

COS doesn’t hold students back until they’re ready. Its ensembles have performed at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, the United Nations, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Wave Hill, and the 92nd Street Y, and have toured North America, the United Kingdom, and Asia, most recently three weeks across the Philippines and Taiwan in July 2025.

1995

Every year since, the Discovery Gala at Alice Tully Hall

2007

Carnegie Hall debut with Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson

2025

Three-week tour of the Philippines and Taiwan

What is not measured yet

The gaps in the data, stated plainly.

CURRENT-YEAR FIGURES NEEDED

The tracking above ends in 2025 and says nothing about the program as it stands today. COS needs to supply current enrollment, how many students receive financial aid this season, the number of scholarships awarded last year, and how many families travel more than an hour. Donors and parents both ask for the present-tense version of this page, and right now only the historical one exists.

Alumni returning · former students playing alongside faculty