My usual spiel below if anyone wants to opt out early :p

I'd love to have a full time gig at a college or university

and

I'd love to learn jazz and be the best performer I can be, but ultimately I find it more useful to get a degree that has more to offer than just performance

My irritation with the failings of academic music in a nutshell. It's crazy how much this seems to be a binary if not just in people's minds, in fact.

If more music theory teachers had a better understanding of jazz and if at least some basic jazz was integrated into the average theory classroom, we'd have way more informed students and future teachers. That fact that graduate level theory still manages to ignore jazz and pop music while taking a deep dive in things that won't be relevant to the vast majority of people is saddening.

Yeah yeah, I'm waiting for /u/m3g0wnz to come in and give me the speech about the importance of learning completely impractical skills because it's a dangerous road to go down if humanities get scrapped for "practical" fields, and I agree to a point.

But the issue is, it's not getting covered in graduate or undergraduate. And we're talking about someone who wants to get a masters specifically to teach at the university level and he's shying away from jazz to be better positioned as a teacher. That means he'll almost certainly be teaching undergrads, most of whose only theory will come from their four undergrad theory classes... then they will go out and teach in a world full of jazz harmony and not understand it all.

Going deep into counterpoint while not even understanding how to build 9th chords is like someone preparing to be an elementary school teacher by taking a deep dive into Shakespeare and Dickens in college, but not knowing how to multiply or divide because you feel like one discipline is superior to the other. This leads teachers that are afraid of subjects they are weak in and even pass down either a fear or disregard for the importance of that subject.

In fact, this is a real problem. Female teachers who have grown to believe that they are bad at math and pass that meme on to their female students.

And the same idea is happening in the music world. Jazz is maligned in academic institutions outside of jazz studies programs. Jazz does offer more than performance (but at least OP is realistic about the importance of jazz for performers). I know I keep beating this drum, but I still encounter HS choir and band teachers who are constantly doing music with these larger harmonies and not understanding how they work or how to teach them.

One of the fantastic band directors in the area is scrambling to learn the basics of jazz because the assistant director with a jazz background that teaches the jazz ensemble is leaving and now the head director, with zero jazz understanding, may have to take over that ensemble if they can't find someone with an understanding of jazz to take up the position.

How many schools end up cutting their jazz programs or just never creating them, all because college music education has such tunnel vision and doesn't prepare these teachers. If you get hired into a school with a decent jazz program, but you yourself have no background in it, you're likely to cut that program. And I've seen it happen too many times in small schools.

My wife is so grateful that she had a music theory I and II teacher with jazz background who integrated jazz basics into the theory classroom, though sadly, this was all lost when she finished MT III and IV with someone who did not.

It's sad that for a music theory teacher to have a jazz background is a happy accident rather than something that is expected.

I don't blame OP. It's one of those "don't blame the player; blame the game" scenarios. OP is playing within the rules of the world as they exist. His jazz stuff won't make him as marketable to a world of colleges who want teachers that have deep understanding of a very narrow spectrum of music.