Summer Enrichment Programs - Veridiction Consulting

Going into the dead of winter is the perfect time to be making plans for summer, and if that’s the summer going into your Junior or Senior year of high school then you may want to consider a college-oriented enrichment program. These programs vary wildly in the quality and relevance of experiences they offer, so let’s talk for a moment about what to be looking for if this is of interest to you.

Differentiating Criteria

While you may have specific personal preferences or limits regarding program timing, duration, and cost, there are a few other vital considerations to help you sift through the programs on offer:

Is the program hosted by or at a university you would want to visit anyway? The first thing that you’re going to get out of this program is in-depth time on a college campus (including dorms and food), but this doesn’t mean much to you if the college that’s hosting the program is either obviously too small or big, too cold or hot, too religious or secular, too patriarchal or woo for your known preferences. Prefer a college that you want to visit and are considering applying to.
- Note the word “hosted” in there: universities often (but not always) lease out their facilities to the company that is actually running the program. Do not accidentally confer the institutional prestige of the campus to a third party.
Can the program help you advance or disqualify a key academic interest? Be looking to your top interest and your bottom interest here. For example: if you are keenly interested in pursuing medicine but balk at the “dissect a sheep’s brain” assignment, then it’s good to know that (and adjust accordingly) by encountering this activity before you’ve selected a school that is particularly proud of their top-tier cadaver lab. Contrariwise, if “business” sounds like the soul-selling synonym for “undecided” to you, then perhaps a summer exploration will help you decide for or against it. Clearly it’s more desirable to come out of one of these programs with heightened intellectual curiosity for the subject matter, but realizing “that’s not for me” can also save you from making substantially more expensive mistakes later.
Does the program provide college credit? Some of these programs will offer transferable college course credit, typically “elective,” for participation. While some programs–particularly those run directly by private colleges–may provide distinct benefits when applying to the hosting college, most of them do not. So, lacking admissions benefits and being uncertain about both the hosting campus and curriculum, you should prefer a program that does provide college credit to ensure that you are getting a durable benefit out of the experience.
- Alternately: research-oriented programs that can teach process, produce evidence, and lead to letters of recommendation are also distinctly valuable programs but that depends upon your interest in the material surviving your exposure to it. An elective college credit is still valuable even if you do not care for what you learned while earning it.

Ideally, a program will meet all of these criteria and you, the student, will come back from an enriching summer experience entirely too eager to be done with high school because you’ve already seen your academic future at that university and it is amazing.

If a program does not meet multiple criteria from the list above, it is unlikely to make optimal use of your time and will not count for much when applying to universities. But as a matter of disclosure: I first encountered the World Wide Web at a summer program that only ticked the “academic interest” box and then had it be central to my life’s work for the next three decades. A large part of “luck” is exposure to favorable chance and that is the real lesson of your high school electives, of these summer programs, and of the excruciatingly expensive “General University Requirement” courses you will be compelled to take in the future.

Finding a Program

Given that many of these programs are run by third parties, it should come as no surprise that there are many ways to stumble across many of them. Here are a few:

The Summer Study in the USA directory of programs covers many reputable programs and allows you to filter for college credit specifically from the start of your search.
Snow Day is a newer collection of program data, but is much more expansive than just summer programs. The “Offers College Credit” option is tucked under “Advanced Criteria” after you’ve started a search.
For those of us in Oregon, Oregon Goes To College has a list of summer enrichments, often focused on commuter or CC programs for a wider-than-usual range of ages. Many other states presumably have similar listings.
As a third-party provider, the NSLC Leadership Pre-College programs were favorably reviewed by my fellow IECs. They offer a variety of programs across many university campuses and can provide college credit (for a surcharge) through American University making it likely for them to get 3/3 on the criteria listed above.
Looking in a different direction, a more mentoring-focused program like Polygence may be worth considering as an alternative. While I’ve heard mixed reviews, they’ve all been net-favorable — and Polygence does have a college credit option run through UC Irvine and GATI so that can get at least 2/3 criteria listed above.
For paying clients (💰) I also have access to a private database but it is not demonstrably better than what I’ve already listed above.

Summer Programs are Not Compulsory

These sorts of extracurricular programs provide a preformulated means to demonstrate (ideally) your interest in enrolling, your academic curiosity, and your scholastic aptitude to not just an admissions committee but also to yourself. And that’s great, but you are likely to be paying a premium (💰💰💰) for it so if you’re not certain about a program, look for options that hit similar goals: take lower-cost community college courses for college credit, get entirely too nerdy about a niche interest (invest in your materials) and put your results out in public, et cetera.

The real goal is for you to spend your summers doing something you can narratively describe as worthwhile and there are ways to do that that only you can dream of.