Most High School Summer Programs Are a Waste of Money (Here's What Actually Matters for College Admissions)

Every summer, tens of thousands of American families spend between $3,000 and $12,000 sending their kids to programs with prestigious university logos on the brochures. The kids come home with a certificate, maybe a T-shirt, and a vague sense that they did something good. Admissions officers read those certificates the same way you read terms and conditions. They note it. They move on.

The uncomfortable truth is that most summer programs are built around optics, not outcomes. They teach students to talk about problems. The programs that actually change a student's trajectory teach them to build solutions. And in 2025, building solutions means understanding how to apply data and AI to real-world problems. If your child comes home from summer with a pitch deck, that's a souvenir. If they come home with a working model that analyzes real data and makes predictions, that's a portfolio.

Why Most High School Summer Programs Don't Move the Needle

Let's be direct about what traditional programs sell: access and atmosphere. Attending a business program at a well-known university feels meaningful. The campus is impressive. The staff are credentialed. The students are motivated. None of that is bad. But none of it is differentiated, either.

When every ambitious high school junior attends Wharton's Leadership in the Business World, or Babson's Summer Study, or NSLC Business and Entrepreneurship, the credential stops being a signal. It becomes noise. Admissions officers at selective colleges are not impressed by attendance. They are impressed by what you did with the experience.

Here's what most of these programs actually produce:

• Group case study presentations

• General exposure to business vocabulary

• A certificate of completion

• Networking with peers at roughly the same level

• One or two weeks of structured lectures
  

That's a decent orientation. It's not a differentiator. According to a 2024 survey by College Transitions, over 60% of rejected applicants to T20 universities had attended at least one prestigious summer program. The programs did not protect them. What separated admitted students was demonstrated ability: research, projects, published work, or built tools with measurable outcomes.

The question to ask about any summer program is not "Is this prestigious?" It's "What will my child produce?"

What the Top Summer Programs for Students Interested in Business Are Actually Doing Now

Business has changed. The students entering college in 2026 and 2027 are going to work in firms where every finance team has a data analyst, where HR decisions are driven by predictive models, and where the consultants who get promoted fastest are the ones who can read a Python notebook. Summer programs that ignore this are preparing students for a version of business that no longer exists.

The top summer programs for students interested in business in 2026 share a few structural features that separate them from the pack:

• Individual project ownership. Not group work. Your project. Your data. Your model.

• Mentorship with iteration. A mentor who reviews your work weekly, pushes back, and helps you improve it.

• Technical depth alongside business framing. Students learn why a model works, not just how to run it.

• Deployable outputs. Something you can show a college interviewer, link from your Common App, or demo in a Zoom call.
  

Among the best online summer programs for high school students, the ones that combine AI with applied business domains have produced the strongest admissions outcomes. The reason is straightforward: an AI project applied to a real business problem is inherently specific. It demonstrates curiosity, technical ability, and domain knowledge simultaneously. A pitch deck demonstrates none of those things on its own.

How a Real Project Changes the Entire Admissions Conversation

Here is what a strong summer actually does for a college application. It doesn't just add a line to the activities section. It becomes the thread that connects the activities section, the essays, the recommendations, and the interview.

When a student has built something real, every part of the application gets easier. The essay writes itself because there's a genuine story of struggle and iteration. The recommendation letter writes itself because the mentor watched the student work through hard problems. The interview answers write itself because the student has real answers to "tell me about a challenge you overcame."

When a student attended a two-week lecture series, none of those things are easier. The essay becomes generic. The recommendation becomes templated. The interview becomes forgettable.

The top extracurricular activities for high school students that actually strengthen applications share one characteristic: they produce evidence. Not attendance. Not exposure. Evidence of capability.

A few things to look for when evaluating any summer program:

• Does the student produce an individual deliverable with their name on it?

• Is there a mentor with domain expertise, not just a program coordinator?

• Can the output be continued or extended after the program ends?

• Does the program teach the student to explain their work to someone outside the field?
  

If the answer to most of those is no, the program is selling a credential. The programs that answer yes are building a portfolio.

Aayan Deshpande Built Something That Mattered

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXIHY2UA21o

Aayan Deshpande came into BetterMind Labs with a clear interest in data and medicine and no prior research experience. He did not arrive with a polished idea. He arrived with curiosity and the discipline to see something difficult through to the end. The problem he chose is one that stumps neurologists regularly. Multiple Sclerosis is notoriously hard to diagnose because the symptoms vary wildly across patients, both in type and severity. The disease is best treated early, which makes early detection critical. Aayan built an AI model at BetterMind Labs to predict and analyze MS risk based on gender, reported symptoms, and MRI details. That is not a science fair project. That is an applied machine learning system trained on real clinical variables, built to support early diagnosis of a condition that affects nearly one million Americans. The model takes structured input features, runs them through a trained classifier, and returns a risk prediction with interpretable outputs. A clinician or researcher can see not just what the model concluded but why it concluded it. What made this possible was not raw talent. It was the structure BetterMind Labs built around Aayan. His mentor understood both the machine learning architecture and the medical domain, which meant Aayan was never left guessing whether he was solving the right problem in the right way. BetterMind Labs gave him weekly milestones so the project moved forward steadily instead of stalling in the planning phase. The workflow was clear from day one: understand the problem domain deeply, gather and clean the data carefully, build iteratively, evaluate honestly, and present in a way that anyone can follow. By the end of the program, Aayan had a GitHub repository, a working model, thorough documentation, and the ability to explain the entire project in thirty seconds to a parent or thirty minutes to a researcher. That is what a summer should produce. Not a certificate. Not a group presentation with four other students' names on it. A thing you built, that has your name on it, that works. His BetterMind Labs project became the backbone of his college application. It showed up in his essays because there was a real story of iteration and problem-solving to tell. It showed up in his recommendation letter because his mentor watched him work through genuine difficulty and come out the other side with something real. It showed up in his interviews because he had something concrete and specific to talk about, not a vague account of what he learned at a summer program. Every part of his application had more to say because his summer had more to show.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Do prestigious university summer programs actually help with college admissions?

Attending a program run by a well-known university can show academic curiosity, but on its own it does not significantly move the needle at selective schools. What admissions officers respond to is evidence of what you did during the summer, not where you attended. A project with measurable outputs will consistently outperform a certificate of attendance.

Q: Can a high school student really build a meaningful AI project without a computer science background?

Yes, and this is one of the most important shifts in technical education over the last three years. With proper mentorship and a structured curriculum, students with no prior coding experience can build real, functional machine learning models applied to problems they care about. The key word is mentored. Self-directed exploration rarely produces outcomes that are portfolio-ready.

Q: How do admissions officers evaluate summer activities?

Admissions officers look for specificity, depth, and genuine investment. A summer spent going deep on a single meaningful project signals maturity and intellectual seriousness far more than a list of brief program attendances. They want to see that the student did something, not just that they showed up somewhere.

Q: What makes BetterMind Labs different from other summer programs?

BetterMind Labs is built around individual project ownership with expert mentorship, not cohort lectures or group deliverables. Students work on real AI and data problems in domains they choose, under the guidance of mentors with genuine technical and industry experience. The output is a portfolio-ready project the student owns completely, which becomes the center of their admissions story rather than a line item on an activities list. For students serious about AI, business, or research, that structural difference is what changes outcomes.

What Actually Matters This Summer

The families who get this right are not necessarily the ones who spend the most. They are the ones who ask the right question before they write the check. Not "Is this program prestigious?" but "What will my child produce?"

Grades and scores set the floor. Projects, research, and demonstrated capability are what take students above it. The students getting into the most selective programs in the country increasingly have something to show, not just something to list. A working AI model. A published paper. A system that solves a real problem.

Summer is not a break. For students serious about where they are going, it is the highest-leverage stretch of the year. Twelve weeks where nothing is mandatory and everything is possible. The students who use it to build something real come back in September with a fundamentally different application than the ones who spent it collecting credentials.

If you want to understand what that kind of summer looks like in practice, start with the student stories at bettermindlabs.org. The programs there are selective and rigorous. They are also exactly the kind of experience this entire essay is describing. Not because BetterMind Labs paid for this paragraph, but because what they do is the correct answer to the question this article is asking.

Build something real. Everything else follows.