Reply to Pay to Play Summer Programs

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why are college counselors dissuading kids from participating in so-called "pay to play" programs on the basis that they signal wealth and privilege?

Private school, club sports or other expensive ECs - not to mention the parents' professions and zip code - also signal wealth and privilege but no college counselor is discouraging those types of things.  Also, isn't "full pay" suppose to be an advantage in college admissions so, for example, it would be good for my public school kid to participate in an expensive program to signal that we are "full pay"?

People say that "pay to play" won't give your kid an advantage in getting into colleges, but from what I've seen from the current seniors, a good number of them did do a pre-college program at a college and also got into that college.  I can think of specific kids who did pre-college programs at Brown, Duke, UChicago, Northwestern, U. Michigan, Georgetown, and were accepted to those schools senior year.  They probably did leverage that "pay to play" summer experience in essays and activities lists to show "demonstrated interest."[/quote]

I think this is a case of "wishful thinking" on our part. They don't help anything except the bottom line of the offering school.[/quote]

A summer program can help the application tell a credible story. If the applicant says they want to major in X, and they did a summer pre-college program in X, then that program is helpful to the application. They also help your kid get a better understanding of whether or not they really do want to major in X.[/quote]Yes yes that gives you plausible deniability that you are just wealthy and lighting money on fire.

You can take classes at a CC, or online (OCW, coursera) classes, yadda yadda. come on people, be serious. [/quote]

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