Who has the most influence over a 17-year-old? Another 17-year-old. That’s the theory behind a program called College Summit that seeks to boost college attendance among low-income students.

College Summit alumni at a July workshop. Photo from College Summit.

Twenty years ago, a Yale grad named J.B. Schramm began working with 4 high school students at a low-income DC housing project where he was director of a youth center, trying to set them on a path to college.

The product of inner-city schools in Denver, Schramm knew how crucial college had been in his life. He also knew that many of his high school peers hadn’t seen college as a possibility even though universities were looking for students just like them.

Now College Summit, which Schramm still heads, works with 35,000 students across the country, including over 4,700 students at 28 schools in its National Capital Region. While a few of those schools are in or near Baltimore, most are in DC and its Maryland and Virginia suburbs.

In DC, the program will be in place this year at 6 charter schools and 5 DCPS schools. Eleven traditional public schools in Prince George’s County will participate, and 4 in Arlington or Alexandria. No schools in Montgomery County have adopted the curriculum, but some individual students there participate through nonprofit organizations.

Part of the program consists of a high school curriculum designed to put students on the path to postsecondary education. But the other part of the program is what’s truly innovative: taking students who are identified by their schools as “peer leaders” and instilling in them a college-going mindset. The idea is that these students, who are not necessarily the top achievers, will reset the school culture and redefine what it means to be cool.

It seems to be working. Nationwide, schools that have partnered with College Summit have seen an improvement in college enrollment rates ranging from 12 to 18%. Locally, the results have been even better. Schools in Prince George’s County that partnered with College Summit saw a 27% increase in college enrollment rates after implementing the program for 5 years. Among the peer leaders themselves, the rate of college enrollment is about 80%, both nationwide and in the DC region.

Although college graduation rates for participants in the program aren’t available, College Summit says that 75% of its students return to college after freshman year. That’s a crucial indicator of whether a student is likely to earn a degree, and it’s on a par with the “persistence” rate of students across all income groups. Locally, the rate is slightly higher, at 80%.

Workshops for peer leaders

At the heart of the peer leader program is a 4-day summer workshop for rising seniors held at a college campus. Over the course of a long weekend, the peer leaders meet with college counselors who volunteer their time. They spend long evenings in “rap sessions” designed to give them a sense of empowerment. They encounter “alumni leaders,” college students who were at one of these workshops themselves just a few years before, and who are living proof of what’s possible.

And they spend two and a half days in group writing sessions, working on their college essays. This summer, I volunteered as one of 13 writing coaches at a workshop held at the University of Maryland Baltimore County that had 63 peer leaders from local high schools in attendance. (Full disclosure: I’ve also supported College Summit financially.)

I happen to have a background in teaching writing, and I’ve done a little work with high school students, but neither of those things is required. College Summit provides a few hours of training for writing coaches, which is, amazingly, all you really need in most cases.

The organization has evolved something of a formula for extracting compelling college essays from students who are largely clueless about where to begin (as are many 17-year-olds): You try to get each student to identify a story about themselves. Then you coax them into telling that story as vividly as possible. Finally, you try to get them to figure out why they’re telling that story. What does it say about them as individuals?

Some of my fellow writing coaches had students with dramatic stories in their groups. One boy had been locked up 10 times and said that during his last incarceration he’d resolved to change the path he was on. Others had experienced the deaths of parents.

Students’ stories

The 5 kids in my group didn’t volunteer stories like that. But the College Summit approach is that every student has a story, and 3 of my peer leaders had managed to identify a pretty good one by Saturday morning, 24 hours after we’d first met. Getting them to figure out why they were telling it, though, was a harder task. The two others, who in some ways were the most creative thinkers in the group, kept gravitating towards abstract thoughts rather than an actual story.

But when I met with the college coaches and chaperones who knew more about my students than I did, I discovered that some of my students had stories they had chosen not to tell. That dreamy, gentle boy who used rich poetic language to write about the power of art? He’d been to 11 different schools by 11th grade and had been homeless for a while, something I would never have guessed.

Another boy was a charmer who’d written a solid description of his near-death experience on a rollercoaster. But I discovered that his academic record was so poor he was in danger of not graduating.

And the girl whose mind kept spinning off in fascinating directions but whose paper remained stubbornly blank? When I discovered she’d been diagnosed with ADD I wasn’t surprised. But it increased my determination to help her figure out a way to capture on paper the quirky intelligence that had so captivated me in person.

Somehow, by the time they left midday Sunday, they all had decent essays, or at least the beginnings of one. A College Summit workshop functions like a pretty well-oiled machine, taking in kids who have a vague idea that they’d like to go to college and releasing them a few days letter with a draft of an essay, a list of schools in categories from “safety” to “reach,” and some ideas about financial aid.

They’ll get further help at their high schools, but the road ahead is likely to be bumpy for many of them. Will the peer leaders at my workshop actually make it to college? Will they go back to their high schools and spread the college-going gospel? The statistics say there’s a good chance, and the tears that flowed during the closing ceremony seemed to indicate that something had clicked for many. But of course there’s no guarantee in any individual case.

I know the kids in my writing group had a powerful effect on me. Almost a week later, I still find myself thinking about them before I fall asleep and when I wake up in the morning, and it’s hard for me to imagine I’ll ever forget them. I can only hope that I, and College Summit, will have a similarly lasting impact on them.

Natalie Wexler is a DC education journalist and blogger. She chairs the board of The Writing Revolution and serves on the Urban Teachers DC Regional Leadership Council, and she has been a volunteer reading and writing tutor in high-poverty DC Public Schools.