The Forgotten Summer — Then and Now

“For college-intending students, successfully navigating the post-high school summer requires a level of financial and college literacy that may be unrelated to their ability to succeed in the classroom.”

In 2012, Harvard Graduate School of Education published an important paper titled “The Forgotten Summer” by Benjamin Castleman and Lindsay Page. This was to be a key academic paper on the subject of “summer melt” which, summed up simply, is when high school graduates with plans to attend college in the summer never step foot on campus in the fall. The paper discusses the concept of summer melt and addresses why certain students are more heavily affected than others.

Here we’ll discuss the importance of the paper, how it affected the research and attention to summer melt, and how means of addressing summer melt have changed since this pivotal paper.

The paper starts out with Castleman and Page discussing the impact of economist Gary Becker’s model of human capital investments, which, among many other things, states that low-income students find exponentially greater benefit in a college degree than high-income students. According to Becker’s theory, low-income students should do everything they can to get into college. But Castleman and Page recognize that that’s no simple task. They examine and address many barriers to college that affect low-income students so much more than high-income students. Determined for a solution to the problem and realizing the high supply of available college counselors during the summer months, the research duo set out to conduct some empirical studies.

Earlier in the year, the two researchers had created an experiment where a group of students was given extra college counseling support in the summer. Compared to the control group, this experimental group was found to be 14% more likely to successfully enroll in college, all for less than $200 per student. This was exciting information, but the duo realized that low-income students would benefit even more from such a program. By setting out to repeat the experiment in a much larger group and with low-income students, The Forgotten Summer completely altered the perspective on summer melt.

The experiment with low-income students was an even greater success, increasing college enrollment by 17% and stating clearly that “proactive outreach and the offer of college counseling helped students to achieve greater stability in realizing and persisting in their college plans.” With this statement and the evidence to back it, the quest to solve summer melt became a little more serious, especially for low-income students.

Since its publication, The Forgotten Summer has made summer melt an increasingly investigated topic. Castleman and Page continued to pursue research in the field of summer melt and eventually wrote the book on it. Just a month after the publication of The Forgotten Summer, Lindsay Dougherty of RAND Corporation published her thesis on Summer Link, a district-wide platform for personalized summer counseling on a more realistic budget than previously suggested. Besides its more realistic means, Summer Link was one of the first solutions to address the prevalence of summer melt among minority and first-generation college-bound students in addition to low-income students. Dougherty also found that the top reason students reported wavering commitments was due to uncertainties in financing higher education.

Though Summer Link was a great start to creating a more realistic solution to summer melt, it hasn’t been enough. Over the years, however, more and more organizations have been focusing on helping students with their financial literacy for college, offering peer guidance as a support structure, and more recently, keeping them on track with personalized text messages. Castleman and Page actually suggested the possibility of text messaging in their 2012 paper, years before its rise with the combination of AI. Now, certain colleges send out detailed, information-laden text messages using AI to guide students away from summer melt, all for only $0.10 — $2.00 per student versus $48 per student with Summer Link.

As the years go on, summer melt will continue to be looked at from all sides, and new and better solutions will develop. We’ve mentioned methods for preventing summer melt in other articles, and we’ll keep you update on any new technology or techniques that spring up.