Summer Melt

What it is and what Dream Project is doing about it

Erica Ching is a high school lead at Global. She has been as mentor for five quarters at Global Connections High School and YouthForce. She is graduating in June 2015 with a major in psychology and minor in education, learning and society.

Nicole Guenther is the assistant director of curriculum and student services. As an undergrad, she was a high school lead at Ida B. Wells. She graduated in 2012, majoring in English and Dream Project. 

David Alvarez has been a mentor for two quarters at Global Connections High School. He is also one of the transition seminar leads.

Think about the spring and summer before you went to college. You might have had to submit your deposit to your college, revise your FAFSA, accept your financial aid award, find housing and maybe roommates, submit your vaccination records, attend college orientation, register for classes, move to a new city/state/country, buy a shower caddy AND more!

If you’re reading this, you probably managed to make it through this stressful time, but many students do not. Up to 40% of college-intending students who have already made deposits to their college don’t end up on campus in the fall. This phenomenon is called “summer melt.” Research shows that students who are low-income are more susceptible to “melt” over this critical summer period (Castleman and Page, 2013).

Since Dream Project ends our weekly visits with students in March, students end up needing to navigate many of these logistics without the weekly in-person support of their mentors or the structure of Dream Project visits. Realizing this shortcoming, we wanted to take action and expand Dream Project to better support students in successfully transitioning to higher education.

Our goal was to support nearly 2,000 recently graduated Dream Project mentees using calling outreach. This summer, eight experienced Dream Project mentors participated in a pilot summer melt seminar and service-learning course, led by Erica Ching—a Dream Project high school lead at Global Connections High School—and Dream Project staff member Nicole Guenther.

The undergraduate mentors engaged in learning about research on summer melt, effective interventions, resources on college campuses to suggest to mentees, details about FAFSA and WASFA, COMPASS placement test preparation resources, and more. In the weekly seminar, they learned content and then practiced how to relay that information to mentees by engaging in mock phone conversations.

Each week, the mentors spent several hours calling and talking with students, leaving voicemails, texting them and emailing them resources. In an end-of-quarter evaluation survey, 100% of mentors surveyed indicated that they felt that their calling had impacted students and that the seminar had made them feel more confident about supporting mentees through the college application process.

These mentors also planned and implemented a Summer BBQ for incoming freshmen at the UW. The BBQ took place on September 13 at Seward Park. Mentors and incoming freshman who were Dream Project mentees shared stories and ate burgers. Students were able to explore Seward Park, play card games and kick soccer balls. We had all students write a letter to themselves as a reflection and what they look forward to during the 2014-2015 school year. We plan to send those letters to each student at the end of their first year in college.

We’re working on planning the summer seminar for next year! If you want to collaborate or have ideas, please email us at dreamproject@uw.edu. For more information on the phenomenon of summer melt, please consider reading one of the articles we used in the class this summer:

Castleman, B. L., and Page, L. C. (May 1, 2013). Can Text Messages Mitigate Summer Melt? New England Journal of Higher Education.