Recent reading reminded me of the myths about the origins of not having schools open in the summer. One common story is that this was a feature of rural schools, permitting the students to assist their families in the farming/ranching operation. (Note that this seems to ignore the fact that planting occurs in Spring and harvesting in Fall.) The corrected history focuses much more on the oppressive heat of classrooms prior to air conditioning. This heat, exacerbated by the density and built environments of cities, apparently led to desire to avoid the summers.
For many decades, the closure of schools was accompanied by the prevalence of summer jobs for young people. Indeed, summer was the time that college students earned money to help defray the cost of their education.
The growth of internships is an interesting related phenomenon. Over the past two or three decades, work organizations began to view internships as an extended job interview, permitting them to identify future hires. At the same time, there’s evidence that the intern experience was increasingly valued by employers making decisions on whom to hire in paid positions. Laws and regulations arose to permit unpaid internships in many cases. Increasingly, paid summer job experiences for our undergraduates have been replaced by unpaid internships.
So, at the undergraduate level, the prevalence and perhaps even the desirability of a paid job in the summer has declined over time, replaced by need to obtain an internship that will assist in getting a “real” job after graduation.
Georgetown, for decades, has offered a reduced schedule of courses in the summer for undergraduates. However, our surveys of students show that the prevalence of taking summer courses is rather high, varying across schools, with about 50% to 75% of the students taking some summer courses at some point in their undergraduate career. About half of the summer course taking is not at Georgetown, but at institutions other than Georgetown, which requires the student to transfer credits to Georgetown. There is a tendency for the full-scholarship and the no-scholarship students to take summer courses than those on partial scholarship. It is common for students to fulfill core requirements in their summer selections and to catch-up and assure degree requirements on schedule. Our students clearly are seeking summer courses.
It may be time to discuss whether Georgetown can improve its use of the summer, to the benefit of students and faculty. There are several questions that come to mind:
- Could Georgetown mount more programs to serve students who are interning in DC in the summer so that they could accelerate or maintain their academic progress?
- Could new curricular offerings be designed to parallel students’ summer internships, providing creative thinking capacities, problem-solving capacities valued by their internship organization as well as their future employer?
- Would some faculty prefer to teach in the summer (versus the fall or spring) so that they could conduct their research activities in the fall or spring semester?
- Could Georgetown offer families a lower cost way to achieve a bachelor’s and a master’s degree by innovative use of summers?
- Would online offerings be useful to undergraduate students pursuing internships away from DC?
- How could Georgetown serve our students and faculty better by offering more flexibilities in using time in the Summer?
These and others are worth discussing over the coming months, all to discern whether we could serve our students and faculty more effectively.
Innovation can be a four letter word among some faculty circles, but extended summer sessions could be aligned towards a three year interdisciplinary A.B. degree. A fixed eight semester program for all students is increasingly ill-suited to more agile forms of learning.
Two thoughts: the summer session is ideal for asynchronous online courses since they offer flexibility for students who are working irregular hours or in different time zones. Many undergrads take summer courses to deal with the enormous number of required courses. So if we want more affordable degrees we could revisit the number of requirements outside the major.
Great discussion. Important questions. Thanks you are always thinking forward . Also look at grad schools – law ,med school , , and grad schools to see what models they have had that might help and what inout they might have to engage in new changes. Maybe joint programs with undergrads etc.