Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 20

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.

College admissions experts
say that for many families,
these experiences aren't
worth the often very hefty
price tags. Harvard's precollege program costs $4,600
for a two-week session,
while Brown charges $2,776
for one week and $6,976
for a four-week version.
Among the private, for-profit companies that run precollege 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 tenday 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 precollege programs are not nearly as selective as undergraduate
20

September/October 2019

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. "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-

Washington Monthly - September/October 2019

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