We’re sure many of you have gotten the marketing materials (or emails) encouraging your child to apply to attend one of the many Ivy League summer programs that tout the benefits of giving your child an elite Ivy League education during the summer months when they might otherwise be lazing around. You might have even looked into one of these programs, banking on the tacit promise that getting your child to attend one will boost their admissions odds when they eventually apply to the host school once senior year rolls around. 

Are Ivy League Summer Programs Worth It?

But we at Ivy Coach have some bad news for those of you who took these schools at their word and considered an Ivy League summer program. They’re scams! Every. Last. One of Them! It might be a hard pill to swallow, but it’s true! Ivy League summer programs don’t confer any admissions advantages to your child should they enroll. The reality is that colleges are much more interested in applicants who spent their summers developing a competitive singular hook oriented around a specific passion, cause, discipline, or idea than those who attended one of these fancy schmancy programs. 

Take it from Ivy Coach’s own Hannah Skaran, who was recently featured in the Town & Country article “Are Summer Sessions for High Schoolers at Elite Colleges a Waste of Money?“: “’Historically, summer programs do not confer an advantage,’ said Hannah Skaran, senior admissions consultant at Ivy Coach. ’They are very expensive, and a lot of people do them relying on the unsaid implication that they are gaining some kind of admissions advantage by participating. But the reality is, they are not.’”

How Ivy League Summer Programs Backfire

What’s worse, oftentimes attending a summer program ends up backfiring. Let’s say you attend one such program at the University of Pennsylvania. You, quite reasonably, assume that this will give you a leg up when applying to Penn, only to be disappointed when you’re passed over in the Early Decision round for applicants who (quite likely) used their summers to distinguish themselves by making an impact in their local community or in their field by pursuing their singular hooks. Then, when you go to apply to other schools for the Regular Decision round, you’re suddenly faced with a bind: these schools assume (rightly or wrongly) that you applied ED to Penn because of that pesky summer program staring at them on your resume. And why would they want to admit you when they know you had your sights set on Penn?

It might sound outlandish, but this type of situation is quite common. You wind up with no elite college acceptances, a summer wasted on trivial pursuits, and a hole in your pocket the size of a semester’s worth of tuition! However, we will concede that not all of these programs are terrible. In fact, there’s one that defies these rules and helps boost admissions odds at the host institution.

University of Chicago’s Summer Program Actually Makes Good On Its Promise

The University of Chicago bucks higher education trends in more ways than one. Their Pre-College Summer Session is the only summer program that gets the Ivy Coach seal of approval because it’s the only one that actually confers an admissions advantage (at UChicago only). Students who get into the UChicago summer program get access to an exclusive “Summer Session Early Notification (SSEN) Program” that genuinely boosts their odds of being admitted to this excellent alternative to an Ivy League.

Is this unique take on summer programs simply a way for UChicago to game its yield rate? Likely so! But, as Hannah Skaran continues for Town & Country, “’Students who are contractually obligated to attend if they’re admitted —that is an automatic yield. That’s not someone you have to fight for, you know, if they were also admitted to Harvard or Yale or Princeton. They’ve already got that locked down. So they’re doing it to encourage more ED applications… And now they’ve given them the option to pre-empt all those (normal) deadlines. I think they’re banking on that being an attractive option to a lot of top students.’ Because of this, Skaran said that the SSEN option is an outlier amongst summer programs in that it actually does put weight on the admissions scale. ’It’s making it so that attendance in one of these summer programs is conferring an advantage,’ she said.”

So, UChicago schools the Ivy League once again, this time on how to make a little extra summer revenue without misleading families. Ivy Coach salutes you!