I'm a college professor, and I have a very difficult time conceptualizing how a HS student could ever contribute to or even meaningfully support research in my particular field. It's not snobbism - people can definitely learn to do what we do and I love to train them - but the knowledge and skill required take years to accumulate, as they do in many fields. (We don't often have repetitive or demarcated tasks that could be taught quickly to an intern, for example.)

What that means is that it would be disingenuous and unfair for me or my institution to take money from a HS family and call the student's experience an "internship" when at most it would look more like filing.

As a donut hole family, we were struggling to pay tuition, room and board, didn't have extras to throw on pay to play programs.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Op here: that’s what I thought. I told her it is just like those camps at Harvard or MIT and parents think it’s impressive because of the time. It’s overpriced and meaningless. I’ll add that apparently it also guarantees a LOR with it, at the end. I asked my friend how can they guarantee a LOR before they even met your kid?!

Its not meaningless if its catered to what the child is interested in and you can get high school or college credit.

It relates to what the child is interested in. No credit is awarded or offered. They give a paper “certificate” at the end.

I don’t think it is likely to help much with college admissions but if it’s easily affordable maybe it’s a good way to confirm her interest in the field.

A lot of those pre college programs are crazy expensive and obviously moneymakers. My DS did a few short ones and I tried to focus on ones where the cost seemed appropriate for what was being offered, like $1000/week for programs with room, board and a lot of programming. He wasn’t going to get into the super competitive summer programs some of which are free. He didn’t do these to gain an admissions leg up. It was an opportunity to experience being on a college campus and exploring some areas of interest.

All that said, some of the well known programs that are super selective do cost money as well, so I don’t know that it necessarily means they are useless. Some of those fancy science programs do help with college admissions because they are so selective.