Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 19

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."

o 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 colorblindness" 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 ver-

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).
sion. 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
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Washington Monthly - September/October 2019

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