Around this time every year, families of high school students start considering “pre-college” summer programs at universities like Harvard, Stanford and Columbia.
The idea is appealing. Students live on campus, take classes and experience a preview of college life. Many of these programs cost anywhere from $6,000 to $15,000, and they are often marketed as a way to strengthen a student’s future college applications.
What many families are surprised to learn is that these programs usually carry far less weight in admissions than they expect.
The main reason is that most of these programs are not selective. At many universities, the summer institutes are run separately from the undergraduate admissions office. Participation typically requires tuition rather than a highly competitive admissions process. Because of that, admissions readers tend to interpret them as enrichment experiences rather than signals of academic distinction.
That doesn’t mean they can’t be enjoyable or intellectually interesting. But simply attending one rarely differentiates a student in a pool of highly accomplished applicants.
There are, however, a small number of summer opportunities that do carry significant weight. Programs like the Research Science Institute or the Telluride Association Summer Seminar are extremely selective and often fully funded. Admission to programs like those can absolutely strengthen an application.
But those programs are very different from the typical “pre-college” experience.
One trend that has become increasingly clear in recent years is that colleges are looking less at where a student spent the summer and more at what they actually did with it. Admissions officers are often far more interested in whether a student built something, investigated something deeply or created original work.
Students who spend a summer conducting research, launching a project or pursuing a genuine intellectual interest often end up with a much more compelling story to tell.
In many cases, those experiences reveal curiosity, initiative and follow-through – qualities that admissions readers consistently say matter most.
For families thinking about summer planning, the goal should be less about collecting impressive-sounding experiences and more about creating opportunities for students to explore their interests in a meaningful way.
Those are the summers that tend to stand out most when an application is read.
Marc is the author of Untangling the Ivy League, a best-selling guidebook on the Ancient Eight. He earned a BA from Cornell University and an MBA from University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Marc chaired the admissions ambassadors at Cornell and the admissions advisory board at UNC.
