Reply to Pay to Play Summer Programs

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[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]

As long as the summer program has financial aid that potentially covers the cost for students who need it, it’s not an indicator of wealth anymore. I find it mildly annoying that counselors will call anything that costs $$ pay to play when there’s such a huge variance in both costs and experiences. (Not sure that yours is doing this!) I still love free summer programs, like Gov School, but there’s definitely room for both over the 4 years![/quote]

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