It Starts With Teachers

At College Summit, we are continually inspired by the unique value that teachers and counselors bring to students' lives. Ours is an organization for educators. We aim to simplify, streamline and support the work that teachers and counselors already do to ensure that their students go on to college.

The field of college access is filled with great people doing great work. Yet, over the last 40 years, the likelihood of a student from a low-income family going to college remains unchanged.  We cannot expect to see low-income families sending their children to college at anywhere near the same rate as middle- or upper-income families until we have established a process that works for students regardless of their income.

The solution starts with teachers. With training and tools, teachers provide personal, direct support each week to a classroom of seniors. This enables the counselor in the school to stretch resources even further and ensures that every senior gets the individual attention needed to navigate the college application process. In high schools that partner with College Summit, every senior graduates having completed a post-secondary plan with the guidance and support of a teacher and the expertise of a counselor.

College Summit provides the support, tools and materials that teachers and schools need. When you as teachers have what you need, all of your students can and will succeed in high school and beyond.

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The Students' Own Words
In Their Words is a collection of some of the best student essays from our first ten years.

The College Summit strategy was born from a desire to stop expecting first-generation and low-income students to do what middle-class students can’t do: manage their own way through the college admissions process alone.

"It seemed to me that it took two kinds of adults to help students enroll in college: the expert resource person, usually the school counselor; and the college-experienced adult who manages each student through the process face-to-face, usually a college-experienced parent. With few college-experienced parents available, counselors are asked to take on the impossible task of providing expert resources, and directly managing the process for hundreds of students. Schools serving significant numbers of low-income first-generation students faced an enormous challenge: without someone to manage the process along with the student, how could they expect to send more students to college?"

J.B. Schramm, College Summit Founder and CEO