Working with College Summit

Traditionally, high school counselors serve as the expert and sole resource for supporting students as they navigate the college application process and prepare for their futures.  College Summit’s strategy is for teachers to manage the application process for seniors in their College Summit class. This allows the expert counselor in the school to stretch resources even further and ensure that every senior gets the individual attention needed to complete  the college application process.  Counselors can then focus their post-secondary efforts on providing expertise on college selection and financial aid options.

Teacher Role

Teachers lead each school’s College Summit class and are the key to the students’ success.  For more information about the class, see In Your Classroom.
 

Coordinator Role

Each school designates a coordinator who is responsible for keeping everyone aligned with the overall school strategy. The coordinator is often a counselor, but may be a teacher, principal or other administrator.

The coordinator works closely with College Summit staff to lead on those activities that contribute to the college-going culture of the school and that go beyond a single classroom, including peer leader recruitment strategy, teacher recruitment strategy and parent night coordination.

Counselor Role

Counselors are pulled in many different directions, all the time. College Summit helps to streamline those requests so that counselors can spend their limited time coordinating post-secondary activities as efficiently as possible. With teachers managing students through the process, counselors coordinate guidance school-wide, bringing college-related resources to the school, coordinating financial aid and parent education sessions, providing expert college guidance to individual students. It’s still a huge job, but it works because teachers are touching each student each week in the College Summit class, keeping them personally motivated to graduate from high school and complete the college application process.

Most schools ask their counselors to coordinate College Summit efforts in the school, supporting teachers and continuing to serve as the experts on college selection and financial aid options.

Principal Role

Once a principal and superintendent have agreed that they want to work with College Summit, the principal works with the College Summit team to design an implementation plan that matches the school’s goals and objectives.  To support the principal’s efforts to drive student outcomes, College Summit delivers to the principal a postsecondary scorecard each month so the principal can applaud successes and spot challenges while there is plenty of time to correct them. Principals then meet with College Summit staff at least 3 times a year to review progress and make recommendations, drawn from our national best practices analysis.
Learn more about the College Summit Institute!
Volunteer with College Summit!
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