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Washington Monthly
The Pre-College Racket
Elite universities are making millions off summer programs for teens. What are they really selling?
by Anne Kim
Among the thousands of personal appeals on the crowdfunding site
GoFundMe, you’ll find a 2017 campaign for a young woman named Kirstin,
a then high school junior with wavy light brown hair, hazel eyes, and a
smile that hints at suppressed excitement.
“Kirstin’s Invited to Stanford!” the page, created by Kirstin’s aunt,
declares. “My 16-year-old niece has been offered a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity. After working hard her entire school career to achieve a
goal, she has done it!”
Kirstin, it turns out, was not admitted as an undergraduate, but was
raising funds for an “Intensive Law & Trial” summer program offered
on the Stanford University campus. Tuition for the ten-day program runs
to $4,095, not including airfare and pocket money. “Stanford, one of
the most prestigious law schools in the country, is impressed enough
with her to have invited her to this program in Palo Alto, California
this summer,” the post continues. “Her extended family is trying hard
to raise the deposit of $800.00 by week’s end so this opportunity does
not slip through her fingers.”
Search “pre-college” on GoFundMe.com and you’ll find dozens of similar
campaigns from hopeful students dazzled by the allure of two weeks on
an elite campus. “Going to the Summer @ Brown PreCollege Program would
give me a preview of what life would be like if I attend the school of
my dreams,” reads a 2018 campaign by Benjina, from Newark, New Jersey.
“This program will give me the experience of a lifetime,” writes
Yakeleen, a high schooler from Tucson, Arizona, hoping to raise $2,200
to attend Harvard’s pre-college program. “Coming from a low income
background while being a first generation student, this is a grand
oppurtunity [sic] I intend on taking advantage of.”
These posts reflect the growing trend of summer “pre-college” programs
at the nation’s most prestigious universities. Stanford, which launched
its “pre-collegiate studies” program in 2012, hosts three-week summer
sessions for high schoolers with course options on more than fifty
different subjects, in addition to the mock trial program Kirstin hoped
to attend. Similar programs abound at other elite institutions. In
fact, of the top forty schools ranked in U.S. News & World Report,
all but one—Dartmouth—offer some sort of summer program for high school
students (and, in some cases, even middle schoolers). “More and more
colleges and universities are offering short-term on-campus programs
that offer a taste of what life would be like at their institution,”
reports the International Association for College Admission Counseling.
These programs can offer precocious teens an enriching, hands-on
preview of college life. But they also exploit both the allure of
brand-name universities and families’ anxieties about an increasingly
cutthroat college admissions process in which “summer experiences”
matter. While even ambitious teens once spent their summers scooping
ice cream or lazing by the pool, they now choose from a dizzying array
of summer options, including trips to every corner of the planet and
camps in every subject from robotics to equestrianism. “Admissions
officers want to see that students are spending at least a few of their
weeks productively during the summer,” said Andrew Belasco, CEO of the
college advising firm College Transitions.
The popularity of summer pre-college programs suggests that many kids
and parents see them as a good way to get a leg up on college
admissions. And many universities, including Columbia and Johns
Hopkins, explicitly encourage that belief. But admissions experts I
spoke to were unanimous that, when it comes to getting into college,
the benefits of most pre-college programs are negligible. The big
winners, rather, are the schools themselves, who use pre-college
programs to generate millions of dollars in revenue while relying on
marketing practices that oversell the programs’ benefits, including
elaborate admissions processes that imply a misleading degree of
selectivity.
And while the target demographic is most likely the sort of
upper-middle-class family that can afford expensive private university
education, it’s clear that the universities are consciously drawing in
families who struggle to afford the programs’ high costs. Some schools,
including Stanford, distribute “fundraising guides” encouraging
students to solicit contributions, including through crowdsourcing
sites like GoFundMe. “With successful planning, creativity and
resilience, students have worked with their community to achieve the
goal of funding,” Stanford’s guide reads. “This is a great opportunity
to gain leadership skills and connect to your community.”
For Kirstin’s family, creativity appears to have taken the form of
debt. “We came up short but Kirstin saved and raised $650.00 on her
own,” her aunt wrote in an update posted July 2017. “Brian and I put
the balance of her tuition on credit because we are not letting this
pass her by.”
To be fair, summer pre-college programs sound like a lot of fun for
teenage overachievers. “They’re summer camp,” said Brian Taylor,
managing director of the New York–based admissions consulting firm Ivy
Coach. At Harvard, for example, pre-college students live on campus,
eat at the dining halls, and explore such topics as “the psychology of
color-blindness” and the “science of happiness.” UCLA’s program
promises “Movie premieres. Comedy shows. Major league baseball and
soccer games,” along with excursions to Santa Monica Beach and shopping
in Beverly Hills.
For careful shoppers who understand what they’re buying, the programs
can be richly rewarding. Michele Gilman, a law professor at the
University of Baltimore, sent her daughter to Brown for a summer
workshop in number theory. “It was a chance for her to explore an
interest in a way that she couldn’t access in high school,” Gilman said.
Shellie Bressler, another Washington, D.C.–area parent, said she sent
her sons to pre-college programs so they’d know what to expect as
college freshmen living away from home. “I wanted them to see what it’s
like to live in a dorm with a stranger and have freedom and flexibility
outside of their classes,” she said. Other parents say the programs
helped their children figure out what kind of school they wanted to
attend: big city versus bucolic college town; liberal arts college
versus research university.
In these cases, the experience can pay off. Gilman’s daughter, for
example, now attends Brown and is majoring in math. “She ended up
applying early decision to Brown and got in,” Gilman said. “And I think
it’s because she had such a good experience over the summer. She loved
the campus, she loved the town. Her interest in Brown grew from that.”
But college admissions experts say that for many families, these
experiences aren’t worth the often very hefty price tags. Harvard’s
two-week session costs $4,600, while Brown charges $2,776 for one week
and $6,976 for a four-week version. Some programs offer college credit,
but it comes at a steep premium. Duke, for example, offers a non-credit
“Summer Academy” for $6,745; its “Summer College” program, which allows
students to take one Duke course for credit, costs an additional
$2,800. By comparison, the cost of an entire semester’s worth of
credits at North Carolina community colleges is capped at $1,216.
More to the point, these prices don’t buy what many parents believe
they’re getting with a pre-college program: a backdoor way to get their
kid accepted to their dream school. I interviewed half a dozen
professional admissions consultants, most of them former college
admissions officers, and all of them said that pre-college programs
generally don’t give kids a special edge on their applications or carry
the prestige that many families think they do. “Some of our parents who
come to us have paid thousands of dollars to these programs thinking
their students get an advantage, which is just not the case,” said
Belasco, the CEO of College Transitions. “People attend these programs
all the time and then don’t get in,” said Ivey Consulting’s Anna Ivey.
“It can be heartbreaking because they’ve fallen in love with the
school.”
(Kirstin’s fundraiser for Stanford’s pre-college law program, for
instance, declares, “Attending Stanford has been a lifelong dream of
Kirstin’s.” Her family didn’t respond to multiple interview requests,
but a student with her name, from the same small town in Vermont, made
the dean’s list at the University of New Hampshire last fall.)
One reason these programs don’t blow the socks off admissions officers
is that they don’t reflect either the academic rigor or the selective
admissions of the institutions that host them. Many pre-college
programs are run by separate departments within a university (often the
school of professional studies), or even by an outside company, and so
have no connection to undergraduate education or admissions.
Among the private, for-profit companies that run pre-college programs
is Envision, a subsidiary of the global educational travel company
WorldStrides. In addition to programs at Johns Hopkins, UCLA, Yale,
Rice, Georgia Tech, and other schools, Envision runs the Stanford-based
mock trial program that was the subject of Kirstin’s GoFundMe campaign.
Although that program hires Stanford Law School faculty to help teach
some classes, the fine print on the Envision site notes, “This cultural
excursion is not affiliated with Stanford Law School in any way.” It
is, in other words, a side hustle for Stanford professors. Children
“invited” to attend are invited by the company, which also runs the
admissions process, not by Stanford Law. Likewise with Envision’s
“Global Young Leaders Conference,” a ten-day excursion costing $3,095
that includes embassy visits, a tour of D.C., and “real world
simulations” that seem very much like what one would do in a high
school Model United Nations. Like the mock trial program, the
application process is managed entirely by the company, although
college credit is offered through George Mason University.
Unsurprisingly, given all this outsourcing, summer pre-college programs
are not nearly as selective as undergraduate admissions at the
institutions hosting them—or as families are sometimes led to believe.
This is evident from the sheer volumes of students admitted. Stanford’s
website, for instance, says its summer program serves more than 3,000
students—or nearly double the number it admitted this year to its
freshman class. As tightly as the gates are shut for undergraduate
admissions, they are flung wide open during summer. That’s another
reason why admissions offices aren’t likely to be impressed by an Ivy
League pre-college program on a student’s resume.
“Yeah, they might ask you to write an essay or even ask for a
recommendation letter, but if you can afford the price tag and you show
evidence you can handle it by being a halfway decent student, you’re
going to be accepted,” said Elizabeth Heaton, a former admissions
officer at the University of Pennsylvania who is now vice president of
educational consulting at Bright Horizons College Coach. “I don’t think
I’ve had a student apply to those programs and not get in.”
While some programs require a minimum GPA, the standard tends to be
forgiving. Johns Hopkins, for example, where the average high school
GPA of incoming freshmen is 3.93, requires only a 3.0 minimum GPA for
its summer “immersion” program ($2,575, one week, no college credit).
“Most of our programs are not super selective,” said Liz Ringel, chief
marketing officer for Summer Discovery, a company that runs pre-college
programs on fourteen campuses, including the University of
Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, and other top-tier institutions. “We want
to make sure that students are in good academic standing, they haven’t
been expelled, they don’t have any disciplinary action against them,
and they are going to enjoy the experience on campus.”
Ultimately, schools may be less interested in a student’s academic
brilliance than in their ability to pay. Among the college admissions
consultants I interviewed, the consensus was that a primary purpose of
these pre-college summer programs is making money. “Colleges are
businesses, and one of the reasons they run summer programs is because
they have all of these empty dorm rooms that ideally they could fill
with people and make use of the resources that are already there,” said
Bright Horizons’ Heaton. In 2015, a Brown University administrator told
the campus newspaper that the school’s summer program had brought in $6
million that year, 70 percent of which was essentially profit. “The
summer program,” the paper reported, “is one of several efforts
administrators have made in recent years to diversify the University’s
revenue streams and reduce its reliance on undergraduate tuition.”
It should be said that there are a few long-standing summer programs
that do signal true academic achievement to admissions officers. These
include MIT’s Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science, a free
program limited to eighty high school juniors, and the Princeton
University Preparatory Program, another tuition-free initiative for
low-income high schoolers from neighboring school districts. MIT’s
website attempts to distinguish these efforts from others by cautioning
that while “[m]ost summer programs admit all or most students who can
pay the (high) tuition . . . a number of competitive admission summer
programs select only the best students on the basis of merit and are
often free or comparatively affordable.”
To their credit, some colleges are fairly up-front that going to their
pre-college program won’t be a boon with the admissions office. Rice
University’s website, for example, flatly states that “Admission to
Rice Summer Sessions does not in any way influence your admission to
Rice as an undergraduate.”
Nevertheless, many parents and students still believe otherwise. Some
of this is due to a general conviction that any edge, however small, is
worth it in the college admissions arms race. But colleges help
encourage these perceptions though practices that create the impression
that the programs are more selective and valuable than they probably
are. Some institutions, for instance, explicitly argue in their
marketing materials that their pre-college programs will make students
more competitive. Columbia University’s pre-college website promises
“an Ivy League achievement for your college transcript,” while Johns
Hopkins urges students to “Get an edge on the competition for college
admissions.”
At the same time, Sean Recroft, the assistant dean for summer programs
at Johns Hopkins, said admission to summer pre-college programs doesn’t
help students get into Hopkins later. “It does not hurt if you do a
program and do well,” he said. “But we’re certainly not a feeder to
Hopkins undergraduate programs.”
Perhaps the most common way that colleges build an aura of prestige
around pre-college is by requiring students to go through an onerous
application process that mimics the selectivity of undergraduate
admissions. Harvard, for instance, requires a $75 nonrefundable
application fee, a “counselor report,” and transcripts. Deadlines are
as early as February, creating a sense of urgency in submitting
applications, and the website mentions the role of an “admissions
committee” in reviewing applications. Stanford University’s
“Pre-Collegiate Summer Institutes” likewise requires a $65 application
fee, transcripts, one to four teacher recommendations, and even work
samples (depending on the program). And a blog post on Brown’s
pre-college site warns, “Take the pre-college application as seriously
as you would a college application.”
College Transitions’ Andrew Belasco argues that there’s a purpose to
having such elaborate admissions processes for programs that ultimately
aren’t very selective. “It gets people to buy in,” he said. “You’re
more likely to commit if you have to invest something beforehand and
more likely to think it’s a legitimate program.”
The techniques seem to work. Back at the crowdfunding site GoFundMe, an
earnest-looking teen with glasses and brunette waves named Emma was
hoping to raise $3,650 for another Stanford pre-college program this
summer. “As would be expected, the entire application process was a
difficult one, as it was aimed towards thousands of kids who will
possibly be our next leaders,” she wrote. “As a result, the application
itself was based off Stanford’s college application which included
teacher recommendations, national test scores, work samples, essays,
and more. It was honestly a miracle just to get in!”
These GoFundMe campaigns are evidence of at least some students’
inflated sense of the prestige of pre-college programs. They are also
evidence of how some schools are encouraging students to go to
extraordinary lengths to raise the money to attend. Pre-college
programs don’t qualify for federal financial aid, and while some
schools offer grants or scholarships to cover the cost, the amount is
typically minimal. Notre Dame’s Office of Pre-College Programs, for
instance, says on its website that it only offers “[v]ery limited
need-based, partial scholarships” and “does not offer merit-based
financial assistance or scholarships.”
In lieu of aid, some schools are more likely to direct students to
fundraising guides. In addition to Stanford, these schools include
top-tier institutions like Northwestern, Brown, Emory, and Brandeis.
The results of these tactics are what you see on GoFundMe.
“I’m calling to raise $2500 for the program at Northeastern because I
truly do not want to let go of such an amazing, rigorous program that
will inevitably help me pursue my dreams, and I believe that anyone
given such a great opportunity should never pass it up because of
financial difficulties,” writes Mealaktey, a high schooler in Rhode
Island. “I also cannot pass up the opportunity to study at the
university I am highly interested in applying to in the future.”
Some of the guides supplied by schools suggest tactics like bake sales
and online auctions and even include a sample fundraising letter with
blanks for students to fill in, like this, from Washington University:
“I am a student at (name of school) and have recently been accepted by
Washington University in St. Louis to attend a summer program for
outstanding students. I have maintained a grade point average of ____
and have been highly involved in (list activities, teams, community
work). I have enrolled in (name of courses or program), because I am
passionate about _________.”
Not surprisingly, the for-profit pre-college company Envision also
offers a fundraising guide for students, along with a link to
Fundraising.com, where students can sell popcorn, mugs, T-shirts, and
other products. “Make fundraising part of your personal success story,”
Envision’s site says.
“It’s absolutely appalling,” said Anna Ivey, the admissions consultant,
of these tactics. “So many schools that have summer programs are richer
than God. They don’t need to be taking money from teenagers hoping to
score some extra points in the admissions process.”
So what is the “best” summer experience for high schoolers?
For one thing, there are far cheaper ways to explore an academic
interest over the summer than a pre-college summer program. “Take a
class at a community college,” said Colleen Ganjian, founder of DC
College Counseling. Ivey suggested taking a free online course from
platforms such as edX.org, which features many of the same top-tier
schools. “I understand it’s fun to be on the actual campus,” she said.
“But at what price? And for what benefit?”
Admissions counselors also say that teens should do what they used to
do, before the pre-college and summer experience fad took hold: get a
job. “College admissions officers love jobs,” said Ivy Coach’s Brian
Taylor. “It doesn’t matter if you work at McDonald’s. If you need a job
to help your family pay the bills, that makes you likable, and that’s a
huge part of the process.”
“A job is great,” said Stefanie Niles, president of the National
Association for College Admission Counseling and a vice president at
Ohio Wesleyan University. “They have the opportunity to make money,
manage their money, they learn about responsibility, they’re working in
a team setting. There’s a lot you can learn from a summer job.” Niles
added, however, that the “ideal” summer experience is up to students
and there is no magic formula. “From the admissions side, we like to
see students participate in activities that help them grow, that expose
them to new ideas, and where they may be challenged in new and
interesting ways.”
Nevertheless, so long as the college admissions process remains opaque
and increasingly competitive, and so long as parents and students
become ever more desperate for the brass ring of acceptance into a
selective institution, the allure of pre-college summer programs will
only grow. In fact, the next frontier is pre-college for middle
schoolers, which more schools are beginning to offer. Summer Discovery,
for instance, said it currently runs two such “junior discovery”
programs, at UCLA and Georgetown, but could be expanding its offerings
next year to accommodate parent demand.
Parents, meanwhile, are reluctant to pass up any conceivable potential
advantage for their kids. “Guilt plays into a lot of this,” said one
parent who sent her kids to multiple pre-college programs. “Don’t you
want to give your kids a leg up?” But rather than a competitive edge,
pre-college programs may too often be selling big dreams, false hopes,
and a tantalizing taste of an elite education that is ultimately out of
reach.
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