You’d be hard pressed to go an entire year at Needham High without hearing talk of pre-college programs: Brown, Yale, Harvard, the list continues. For every affluent and high-achieving high school student, there are Ivy League and top-ten schools jumping at the opportunity to inundate them with advertisements for their elite summer classes.
I would know--I’ve done two: EXPLO and The School of the New York Times, both of which are eager to tell you: These are not summer camps, but college preparatory classes for only the most decorated of students, often hosted on colonial-style northeastern campuses, or in cities boasting exposure to robust professional settings. But, there is important subtext missing--these programs are for those elite students whose parents can facilitate a summer experience for the hefty cost of thousands,if not tens of thousands, of dollars. Even more insidiously, there is another implicit message: We want rich kids to have another advantage over less-privileged contenders in the college application process.
I aim to explore pre-college programs as an industry through the lens of academic and educational classism, succinctly described by GALEO (a Georgia-based non-profit advocating for increased civic participation of the Latinx community) intern and public policy student Jimena Somilleda in Classism in Education: “classism… has created an unequal educational system that favors wealthy communities and gives students of a lower income a huge disadvantage.” Somilleda goes on to describe a metric by which classism can be measured in education, through “availability of resources, students’ internet dependency, and students’ lives beyond high school graduation.” The former-most and latter-most criteria are most applicable to classism in pre-college education. The first criteria, availability of resources, can be demonstrated by access, or lack thereof, to these programs. This will largely be measured by financial inaccessibility and geographic isolation from these programs. The second criteria, life beyond high school graduation, can be measured by the increase in likelihood of accessing competitive colleges that pre-college students enjoy.
I admit a bias here: I am an affluent, white, and competitive student, who is afforded the privileges of upper-middle class parents and generational financial security. In short, these programs are marketed to people who fit my exact demographic composition. Despite this, my exposure to these programs, and subsequent understanding of how these programs fit into an apparatus of classism has encouraged me to look more critically into the broad implications of the for-profit education industry.
Financial Inaccessibility
Let’s talk cost. College Consensus annually ranks pre-college programs through an index of a few factors: College credits, mentorship, residential experience, and scholarship opportunities. I looked through their 2022 list of the top-30 programs for high school students, and calculated the average cost.* The average top-thirty pre-college program is going to run you up a bill of about $8,640. In the state of Massachusetts, the median income rests at $39,666. Skip the mental math--an average pre-college program will cost over 20% of the median Massachusetts income. Harvard’s College Program for High School Students boasts that it will “strengthen your college application” and “build important life skills that can make your future college experience a success.” Unstated are its financial barriers, with Harvard’s program charging a significant $5,300 dollars for two weeks of programming. Taking into account its stated benefits and its financial inaccessibility, its message is better interpreted with a stipulation: It can strengthen a wealthy student’s college applications, and help those with privilege build important life skills that can make their future college experience a success. Its premise is one of inequity: opportunities for the rich, which impart them with better access to future opportunities, all the while excluding those who might most benefit from a program that bolsters their college application portfolio.
Exceeding cost barriers, there is evidence to suggest that elite schools’ pre-college programs weaponize their status to financially exploit lower-income students. Anne Kim, vice president of domestic policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, investigated the advertising campaigns undertaken by these programs, alleging that “they… exploit both the allure of brand-name universities and families’ anxieties about an increasingly cutthroat college admissions process” to create incentives for families to incur financial burdens, under the premise that they are bolstering their precocious child’s ability to secure a Top-40 acceptance letter. She goes on to cite further predatory methods--rather than offering meaningful financial aid, programs like Stanford's offer fundraising guides, which encourage students to “solicit contributions…through crowdsourcing sites such as GoFundMe.” Stanford’s website goes on to suggest that crowdsourcing financial aid is a “great opportunity to gain leadership skills and connect to your community,” something that reads as distinctly classist--rather than acknowledging the structural inequities of the programming which excludes low-income students, they individualize the problem, suggesting that if a student is motivated and tenacious enough, they will eventually earn access to the school, à la meritocracy.
Succinctly put by Elizabeth Morgan, director of external relations at the National College Access Network: “The reality of these programs is that they’re opportunities for families who can afford them.” Referencing the aforementioned criteria articulated by Jimena Somilleda, it is exceptionally clear that these programs create “an educational system that favors wealthy communities and gives students of a lower income a huge disadvantage” via steep costs and exploitative recruitment means.
Post-High School Advantages
While there is ample data to suggest that pre-college programs are ineffectual in the college application and acceptance process, it would intuitively seem that these exposures are advantageous to those who can access them. As described by the Harvard Pre-College Program, “attending Harvard Summer School and performing well will strengthen your application to any college or university. Additionally, the Pre-College Program offers many opportunities designed to help you navigate the college application process and enhance your performance in a college setting.” For an adept student dead-set on a certain Ivy League, frequent engagement with the school’s programming and offerings has been shown to increase acceptance likelihood. If nothing else, schools are eager to accept students who have shown commitment to their school--and capacity to pay increasingly high tuition rates.
These programs also offer the privileged opportunities to exceed their less-privileged peers in academics--a student who attends Brown’s Number Theory course most certainly would have better exposure to these concepts than one who doesn’t. Pre-college programs allow students with access to develop their interests in a more comprehensive and meaningful way, giving them advanced reassurance in their decisions. It helps them understand their stamina for college dorms, food, and expectations, and prepares them for life away from home: all valuable skills from a developmental perspective, though skills learned through exclusionary programs.
Lastly, many of these programs promise college credits to attendees--something which has been shown to bolster admissions chances. However, these credits come at immense cost. For example, I have two credits from Sarah Lawrence College, which is about a third of the credits offered in a full-year course, for the full price of pre-college tuition. This would make the credit-hour cost exceedingly larger than that of a true college program. Yet again, we see an advantage being given to those with affluence: under the guise of rewarding students with merit--or, evaluated under the index offered to us from Classism in Education, we see wealthy students being offered better opportunities “beyond high school graduation.”
Conclusion
In a town notably complicit with white flight (more on Needham and white flight) amongst other indicators of elitism, classism, and racism, we would be well served by interrogating the ways our choices, benign as they may seem, fuel the rampant educational inequity embedded in academia. Might we re-examine our preferences for elite schools, considering community and state colleges offer their services to high school students, for minimal comparative cost? Might we reprioritize participation in public education, understanding that this infrastructure only succeeds when people across spectrums of economics, status, race, and culture collectively maintain them? And might we relinquish the elitist anxieties which tell us we must succeed for ourselves regardless of the consequences for others?
*Methodology: To identify this number, I used the top thirty ranked pre-college programs according to College Consensus. Two college programs, North Carolina State University at Raleigh and University of California-Davis do not specify cost, meaning they were excluded from my final calculation. For any programs which had a range of costs, I took the average of the extreme values, and added that to the total. The majority of these programs run for about two-to-three weeks, though some outliers may raise costs. The mean costs for two-to-three week programs rested at about $5,000.