In Your Classroom

College Summit works with teachers and counselors in their schools to ensure that every student creates a postsecondary plan and can apply to college.

We know from more than 10 years of experience that when you put smart tools and training in the hands of committed teachers and counselors, dramatically more students from their schools go to college.

We are proud to partner with career educators who bring their teaching skills, their hard-won credibility with students, and their own experience of having successfully transitioned to, and graduated from, college. With College Summit tools, teachers and counselors make a life-changing difference for thousands of students each year.

Postsecondary defines the purpose of school: preparing students for life beyond high school. It is critical for building a college-going culture and for keeping students on the margins engaged. Because postsecondary has disproportionate impact on school culture, high performing schools insist on integrating efforts into the school system and the school day. Once postsecondary planning becomes part of a schools's curriculum and goals, the school's college-going culture begins to change for the better. Add-on programs cannot address the need for a whole-school system. Plus, add-on programs frequently disappear--leaving significant capacity gaps in the system.

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The Students' Own Words
In Their Words is a collection of some of the best student essays from our first ten years.

The College Summit strategy was born from a desire to stop expecting first-generation and low-income students to do what middle-class students can’t do: manage their own way through the college admissions process alone.

"It seemed to me that it took two kinds of adults to help students enroll in college: the expert resource person, usually the school counselor; and the college-experienced adult who manages each student through the process face-to-face, usually a college-experienced parent. With few college-experienced parents available, counselors are asked to take on the impossible task of providing expert resources, and directly managing the process for hundreds of students. Schools serving significant numbers of low-income first-generation students faced an enormous challenge: without someone to manage the process along with the student, how could they expect to send more students to college?"

J.B. Schramm, College Summit Founder and CEO