Page and Benjamin Castleman, co-author of Summer Melt: Supporting Low-Income Students Through the Transition to College, says that summer melt should not be thought of as a problem to be solved by one particular sector.
“When I saw it I was like, ‘Oh, my God. How do you even read this?’” Vang said. “I didn’t even know what it was talking about.”
Fortunately, Vang, a first-generation college student from St. Paul, Minnesota, got help going over the materials and other tasks she needed to complete to register for school this coming semester from an organization called College Possible.
According to the authors of a forthcoming book, far too many students — particularly those from families of lesser economic means — don’t get such help during the summer and, subsequently, they don’t start college the fall after they graduate from high school, if at all.
This problem has been dubbed as “summer melt,” and it is said to impact between 10 and 20 percent of all “college-intending” students throughout the United States. One estimate puts the number of students who “melt away” during the summer at 200,000 students per year.
“While some of these students may eventually return to college, our research to date suggests that students from low-income backgrounds are disproportionately less likely to do so,” said Lindsay Page, a research assistant professor of education at the University of Pittsburgh, and Benjamin Castleman, an assistant professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia, in a statement to Diverse.
Page and Castleman are co-authors of Summer Melt: Supporting Low-Income Students Through the Transition to College, which is slated to be released this September.
