Strengthening College-Going Culture

College Summit is unique in how we train influential students to strengthen the college-going culture in their school. With College Summit’s support, teachers select the most influential students in their rising senior class to attend a College Summit Workshop.

Who are these students? You know them. While seldom the academic “superstars,” they are the young people who are “better than their numbers” and often lead by example and have the credibility and charisma to inspire other students.

These rising seniors have the unique opportunity to serve as a model for their peers by showing that they are indeed “college material.” At the Workshop, these influential students become experts on the college admissions process, gain confidence in their skills, learn to advocate for themselves and leave prepared to enroll in college. Once these students return to school for their senior year, they return empowered as “Peer Leaders” and are ready to support their classmates in transitioning from high school to higher education.

Peer Leaders support the college-going culture in their schools in many different ways. While all support their classmates in planning for college, some are also invited by their schools to speak with students in younger grades. Other schools invite 'Peer Leaders' to speak about their experience to parents and teachers. whichever way your school decides to leverage your Peer Leaders, the result is the same: other students look at these students as role models and follow them on the path to higher education.

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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