Forget about the lazy, hazy days of summer.
As soon as classes are over for the year at John Jay High School in Cross River, N.Y., 16-year-old Jamie Cohen is off to Senegal where she’ll work with AIDS victims for four weeks. Armed with her research, she’ll then head to Yale University to present an AIDS "plan of action" to other teens, as part of a program put on by a travel company. When she applies to colleges 18 months from now, Ms. Cohen says the experience "will definitely help. I’ll do an essay around it."
Amanda Baratz, 14, will head from Kehillah Jewish High School in San Jose, Calif., to Georgetown University this summer for a five-week course on medical careers, during which she hopes to watch open-heart surgery. She’ll take an admissions-exam prep course, too, even though she won’t take the SAT test for another year. That way, "I won’t be pressured when the time comes," she says.
Getting into America’s elite colleges has never been tougher, and now, in addition to grades and test scores, essays, recommendations and class rank, there’s this for teens and their parents to worry about: summer.
"Summers are important, big time," says Lloyd Peterson, vice president of College Coach LLC, which charges $3,499 for its college-counseling services. "The more prestigious the school, the more important the summers are."
Admissions officers dispute that. They say that how a youngster spends summers won’t make or break a college application. "It doesn’t matter as much as what they’re doing in the school year," says Richard Nesbitt, admissions director at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. But as a record number of high schoolers heads for college, summer is taking on huge importance among super-achieving teens and their parents — and a whole industry is sprouting to serve them.
A Boulder, Colo. company called Where There Be Dragons LLC is offering a $6,700 six-week trip to Vietnam where teens will teach English, build houses and help volunteer doctors — in addition to kayaking in Halong Bay and snorkeling in the South China Sea. Community service is "the buzz word" among teens signing up for such trips.
For $5,799, New York-based Musiker Discovery Programs Inc. sells summer courses on medical and law careers, aimed at high-school students. "We passed around a human heart," says Sam Pawliger, a junior at Miami’s Palmetto High School.
For youngsters who already have full résumés, Academic Study Associates of White Plains, N.Y., puts on $2,895 camps where teens will spend two weeks polishing their college-application essays, undergoing mock admissions interviews and prepping for SAT exams. Thirty kids came to the company’s first course two years ago; this summer, it says it’s expecting 150.
A record 16.7 million students are expected to enroll in college next fall, 1.2 million more than five years ago. The U.S. education department expects up to 18.8 million enrollees eight years from now. At the same time, ambitious high-school students are loading up on advanced-placement classes and taking prep courses to boost their scores on college-admissions tests, heightening the competition.
California’s Pomona College says one-third of the students it accepted for next fall scored the maximum 800 on either the verbal or math part of the SAT admissions tests. North Carolina’s Davidson College says one-quarter of its new class has a combined SAT score over 1500.
With the glut of high-scoring applicants, colleges are paying closer attention to factors such as community service, artistic talent, leadership — and summers. "There’s more demand than we can accommodate at the selective institutions. What do you do? You need some tie-breakers," says Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, a Washington, D.C., trade group.
These days, just having perfect grades and perfect SAT scores does not guarantee anything. It’s the complete package that colleges are looking at.
Admissions officers agree — although their view of a complete package doesn’t always square with a consultant’s. Christopher Gruber, acting dean of admissions at Davidson, says he’s looking for students who round out the entering class — a cellist or soprano for the music program, kids with different "life experiences," and those who pursue their academic interests outside the classroom.
The Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decision two years ago also seems to be fueling summer angst for students from affluent families. The ruling freed universities to make decisions on factors other than grades and test scores, including family background and race, among other things.
Still, ambitious students see fat résumés as a way to overcome a perceived handicap. "You’re not a football star, you’re not a minority, you’re us — white, blue-eyed, private-school kids," says Will Daly, 18, a senior at Middlesex High School in Concord, Mass. "What do you do that will make you stick out?"
Last summer, he paid his way to Varanasi, India, where he spent three weeks writing English-language lesson plans for an ashram’s school, then spent another three weeks traveling. "I did not do this for college," says Mr. Daly, who says he went for "the experience." Still, he wrote his college-application essay about the trip. He is going to George Washington University in the fall.
Admissions officers say exotic summer programs don’t give youngsters a leg-up in admissions. A fancy trip "is going to be looked at as an opportunity anyone with $7,000 can get."
