Stemming the tide of summer melt: Investigating summer attrition
among college-intending low-income high school graduates

Benjamin L. Castleman and Lindsay C. Page
Harvard Graduate School of Education

Tuesday, December 6, 2011
6:15 pm light dinner; 7:00 pm lecture

Buckingham Browne & Nichols Upper School,
80 Gerry’s Landing Road, Cambridge, MA 02138

Directions http://www.bbns.org/contact/directions (note: map on this page is not quite right; use BB&N map instead)

Abstract

The summer after high school graduation is a largely unexamined stage of college access among underrepresented populations in higher education. We investigate a variety of evidence related to summer attrition among college-intending low-income high school graduates (a phenomenon commonly referred to as summer “melt”).  In this paper, we first report on descriptive evidence related to summer melt nationally and in several large school districts across the United States.  We find that summer melt is broadly generalizable and of sizeable magnitude, ranging from 10 to 40 percent, depending on the location and student population examined.  We then provide evidence regarding the causal effect of providing college counseling to low-income students during the summer following high school graduation.  Our findings indicate that providing active college counseling to low-income students during the summer months leads to meaningful improvements in both the rate and quality of college enrollment.  Given sample size and generalizability limitations from a first experimental study on summer counseling, we provide preliminary results from a second experiment, conducted recently with a larger and more representative sample of graduates from a large metropolitan school district.  Taken collectively, our results indicate that practitioners and policy makers seeking to improve the flow of low-income students to and through college should further examine this crucial time period.