Early College Programs

Rating:
Summary: This book is solid gold for college-bound students
Review: I recently read EARLY COLLEGE PROGRAMS, and wrote a review for "Bookpage," the independent booksellers' national newspaper. Below are a few sections of that review:

EARLY COLLEGE PROGRAMS is the first book ever written on the relatively little known summer college programs specially designed for high school students. Such programs seemingly exist for college-bound high school students who seek to out-wit the competition when their fate is determined at college admissions time.

Some of the early college programs that this writer noticed in the book are: "Introduction to Computer Integrated Surgery" at Johns Hopkins's "Hopkins Precollege Program;" the "International Relations Program for High School Students" at Georgetown; and, Cornell University Summer College's "Exploration in Architecture." In a workable way, the editor has arranged these and hundreds of other early college programs into 80 career-oriented categories such as "Toward the Making of a Surgeon," "Toward the Making of a Diplomat," "Toward the Making of an Architect," and "Toward the Making of a Filmmaker."

While some, or even many, of these early college programs have long been known to college counselors and students at elite secondary schools like Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles or Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C., the structure of EARLY COLLEGE PROGRAMS attempts to appeal to virtually all college-bound high school students in all income brackets. For example, there is a special section for students interested in early college programs at professional art schools, and yet another for students wishing to attend an early college program at one of the U.S. military academies; in other words, a high school stint at either the Rhode Island School of Design or West Point can look pretty impressive (perhaps extremely so) at college application time. Further, one can go all out and spend thousands of dollars to attend Stanford's "Summer College for High School Students," or opt for the one-week, "All Girls-All Math" program at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln for just a hundred bucks. Importantly, information on available scholarships, as well as a special section for underrepresented youth, is included in the book, too.