2. Clarifying Your Goals

Reach out to your recruitment partner to clarify your process, deadlines, and goals. You may want to present the program directly to students, in which case you and your recruitment partner should begin scheduling a presentation as soon as possible and thinking together about how to get the right students in the room.

For commuting programs you may only need academic teaching assistants or tutors who can work with your students on reading and writing skills, act as a peer consultant for understanding college life, and help them navigate the application process. Residential programs will need staff to work in the evenings and may behave more like camp counselors than academic tutors. Some of our programs employ graduate students to organize logistics such as classrooms and field trips, or to train and supervise undergraduate teaching assistants and tutors. We recommend at least a 1:10 staff to student ratio for general activities and smaller groups for group tutorials. Yale has one set of staff that acts as residential and academic teaching assistants by staggering their hours in the afternoon and evenings. Columbia divides the staff in two: academic TAs work in the mornings (and throughout the academic year) while residential TAs begin their days at lunch. Ursinus has one commuting week and one residential week. It has four tutors that it recruits from the writing center and two residential TAs.
All six work full days during the commuting week, and then divide into morning and afternoon/evening shifts for the residential week.

Once you’ve determined your pedagogical needs, you’ll need to check in with your compliance office or campus advisor to find out your legal needs. Your school may dictate a staff-to-student ratio for minors on campus. For students aged 15-17, the American Camping Association recommends a 1:12 supervising ratio during the day and 1:10 at night. Housing, dining halls, public safety, and HR/compliance may have different answers to the following questions, so be sure to get clarity on what is required as opposed to what is recommended. Students should be accounted for at all times, but there are many different ways of ensuring that your staff know where all the students are.

• What is the required staff-to-student ratio on campus? Is this different at night and during the day? What about during meals or in the dorms?
• What should supervision on campus look like? Do students need to be escorted everywhere on campus or can they walk independently between classes, meals, and activities? Are there any areas that are prohibited to minors even with supervision?
• What should supervision off campus look like? Are there different policies for field trips and off-campus activities? What about for students commuting to and from campus?

To give your students the full college experience you’ll probably need approval from each individual entity on campus, and you may need to pay fees. Reaching out to each office as early as possible can help you avoid major problems later. Be prepared for dining halls to close during the summer or for other programs to book the dorms and classrooms you want. Now is a good time to check in with your campus advisor or the relevant offices to answer the following questions:

• When and how do you reserve dorm rooms for your students?
• When and how do you reserve classroom space?
• Can students get campus IDs?
• What dining halls are open in the summer, what times do they serve meals, and how can students request Halal meals or address other dietary requirements?
• Can students access all campus libraries? Do they need library cards?
• Can students access the gym and swimming pools? Will they need to fill out a waiver?
• Can students use campus computers, borrow laptops, and/or print on campus? If not, how can you provide those tools to students?

Your recruitment material should simply tell students why, when, and how to apply to the program. They’ll need to know the program’s dates and what they can expect to do during that time.

The application should gather basic information about the students, offer them ways to articulate their interest in the program, and demonstrate their writing ability. Carthage is able to do this with a brief form and one essay question, while Columbia’s application is quite lengthy.

See sample recruitment materials and applications from Yale, Carthage, Rochester, Ursinus, and Columbia.

Consider asking students for some or all of the following information. Keep in mind that longer applications could discourage students from applying but could also help you identify the best possible candidates.

Student information

• Name
• Date of birth
• Contact: cell phone, address, parent contact
• Gender (if necessary)
• Country of birth, Parents’ countries of birth
  • Do you need to ask this? You might, if you want to provide immigrants or their children with extra resources such as ESL,TOEFL, or targeted college application help. This question could also discourage applications, so you might wait to ask until after they have been admitted.

Eligibility

Determine your program’s eligibility standards: how will you be sure to accept students from your targeted demographic? At Columbia the eligibility requirements are stated: “Students must be current juniors in a New York City high school to apply. We give preference to students from low-income families and those who will be the first in their families to attend college. Other students are encouraged to apply as well.”

• High School, current year in school, GPA (if necessary)
• Highest level of education for parents
• Low-income status
• You may wish to rely on Federal TRiO income levels to determine if your applicants are “low income.” If so, you’ll need to ask for the family’s taxable income and number of people living in their household.
• Alternately, you might ask your recruitment partners if they have a shortcut for identifying low-income status (i.e. eligibility for free school lunches)

Attachments

All of our current programs ask for an essay or statement from the student explaining why they are applying for the program. You might ask for some of the following attachments to gauge a student’s preparedness, interest, and commitment to the program.

• Personal statement or response to writing prompt
• High school transcript
• Letter of recommendation
• Writing sample
• Parental permission (signature)

Budgeting is something you’ve likely already done as part of your grant application, but now you can get more specific. Write out a daily schedule of your program that synthesizes the program syllabus with the day-to-day practical activities that will take place. Visualize a day in the life of your students and consider your students’ needs at each hour. This can mean the practical requirements--course packets, pens, laptops, sports equipment--as well as their social and emotional needs. What additional equipment, food, rental space, or staff might you need and what will they cost to provide?