You know summer has arrived when the dining hall has replaced its regular food exclusively with chicken nuggets, pizza, corn dogs, hamburgers, and popsicles. Stanford, like many other universities across the country, has found another way to make more money besides squeezing students for everything they have: summer camps. There are a plethora of camps offered at Stanford alone: we have tennis, golf, Computer Science, robotics, soccer, and reading, and those are just the ones I’ve seen so far in my week as Resident Fellow for one of these summer programs.
While sports camps and traditional camping adventure camps are popular in the summer and aren’t exclusive to universities, there is a growing trend in pre-college summer programs which offer to take high school and even middle school students and make them more competitive when applying to colleges by teaching them a new skill. That sounds promising, but what most parents don’t know is that very often, the big bucks they’re paying might be to a national company that is only being hosted by the college. There is no guarantee the students are going to be learning from someone that works at or even attends that university.
I’m on my third stint as a counselor and instructor for one of these camps and I think it’s hilarious that parents are so impressed by the program despite the fact that I have very little teaching experience and am only a year or two ahead of some of the students I am teaching. My fellow counselors and I do our best, but we’re not professors. The extra money parents are willing to invest because it’s “Stanford” or another big name university might not reflect any huge difference in the program from that of a nearby community college.
I do think there is some benefit to sending kids to brand name universities though: these students are more likely to apply after they’ve spent time at the school and hopefully fallen in love. The program I’m currently working with teaches minority students—primarily African-American and Latino—Computer Science in the hopes that they pursue a STEM (science, technology, engineering, or mathematics) major at a top university. Diversity in STEM has become a huge issue in recent years, especially in Silicon Valley, with tech companies going out of their way to recruit minority students. Computer Science has become a coveted skill that people in any STEM field and most other jobs benefit from knowing.
Despite my criticism of the false advertisement by many programs, I continue to work for them because the students really benefit from what my friends and I are able to teach them (even if it’s less than what a professor could teach). These skills do make a difference long-term and are helpful regardless of what field the student ends up pursuing. I believe the same can be said for similar camps that teach different skills, such as writing or math. Overall, I would say pre-college programs are a net positive for the students, although the parents might be able to save themselves a couple hundred bucks if they did some more research.
I haven’t mentioned how these camps affect the main residents of these campuses: the college students. Well, I can guarantee you that most of them end up wishing for the regular dining hall food again, no matter how much they complain about it during the year. Corn dogs every day get really old, really fast.
