The purpose of this qualitative, comparative content analysis was to systematically compare current promotion and tenure guidelines for music education assistant professors among universities within the BigTen Academic Alliance (BTAA). Scant research exists regarding advancement in the United States for tenure-track music education faculty. Given the magnitude of importance placed upon achieving tenure, we aimed to fill this gap in the literature. We addressed the following research questions:1. What are the differences in outlined BTAA university expectations for the promotion and tenure of music education assistant professors? 2. How do teaching, research, and service contribute to overall job responsibilities for music education assistant professors among BTAA universities?3. How do BTAA universities outline specific examples for expectations related to teaching, research, and service that lead to promotion and tenure for music education assistant professors? 4. How do BTAA universities depict the evaluation process and timeline for music education assistant professors seeking advancement? We analyzed promotion and tenure policy documents available online among all 18 universities belonging to the BTAA to identify differences and similarities in teaching, research, and service expectations, as well as evaluation procedures. In our analysis, we employed an overall inductive and comparative strategy (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). We simultaneously collected and coded data, using the constant comparative method (Glaser, 1965). We transferred raw data to a shared Google Drive folder to use as our database. To build a coding frame, we individually analyzed documents for the same three selected universities, extracting codes from the data based upon their potential to answer our research questions. We used in vivo coding to highlight and preserve the original language of the documents. Then, we met together to evaluate and modify our coding frame and define all codes. In the main analysis, we each analyzed documents for six universities, using our shared coding frame (Schreier, 2014). Our next step is to create a data matrix related to each research question and generate themes to answer these questions. This study will be complete by the time of the conference. Preliminary findings indicate that the promotion and tenure process is not homogeneous across BTAA universities. For example, definitions of scholarship, teaching, and research vary among institutions, as does the clarity of the evaluation process. Understanding how each institution within the conference addresses advancement opportunities for tenure-track faculty can help faculty advocate for more equitable, achievable, and realistic expectations.