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<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/education/edlife/leadership-t.html?_r=1&ref=education[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/education/edlife/leadership-t.html?_r=1&ref=education</a></p>
<p>omg i get those mails ALL THE TIME
do not pad your resume with those programs
they are a scam</p>
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<p>Well, aren’t we special? :)</p>
<p>I hate receiving their mail. They have sent me around ten gigantic packages over the past 2-3 years. It’s such a waste of paper…</p>
<p>It’s especially creepy when they have your teachers’ and classmates’ names. They’re going way overboard to try to get you hooked.</p>
<p>I toss these before my kid even sees them.</p>
<p>I get these all of the time as well. I once got an envelope that said “National Youth Leadership Summit (or something to that effect) on Medicine and Healthcare”. Inside the envelope, was information on courses in Government.</p>
<p>I got one of those too…on the outside it said “You’ve been accepted!!!” which was weird because I never even applied</p>
<p>Yeah. They’re pretty annoying.</p>
<p>It is indeed a marketing scam.</p>
<p>I ended up going to the NYLSC, for my individual state, then to the NYLC. Then I felt extremely special to be going to these two, as I was informed it was an honor. I was the first kid going from my school, after all. What colleges wouldn’t love that?!</p>
<p>I do not regret meeting all the wonderful people I did or the experiences the program offered me. I cannot, however, shake the shame I feel when I remember it cost my parents a good $4,000 - for an “honor” I really didn’t earn.</p>
<p>The interesting thing about this one is that I used to receive these from middle school all the way through high school (tossed them) but my brother who attended a school for gifted kids and won state and national academic awards NEVER received anything! That’s when I knew it must be just names from a mailing list…</p>
<p>haha i was that kid with the 3.0 from smoking weed every day… and when i got it, i KNEW it was scam cause theres no way theyd send it to ME and have it be real :P</p>
<p>We get those all the time-into the paper shredder/recycling bin…</p>
<p>Though I am not advocating these programs at all, my D did attend the National Youth Leadership Forum on Medicine last summer and for her, it was well worth the money because her forum focused on med school and what it takes to become a doctor. It was a ten day forum held at UCLA (not sponsored by UCLA) and other than 1/2 day at the Santa Monica Pier, an afternoon and evening at Universal Studios and a dinner dance, she was busy in skills labs, watching a surgery, hearing from doctors in different professions, learning about med school testing and interviewing, designing a group public health project for competition, spending 3 days at 3 different hospitals, etc. More stuff than I can list here. She has used the information she gained for her year-long Sr. project in high school and she is going into a pre-med college program with full knowledge of what she needs to do, the tests she needs to take, etc. so for her the information and skills she learned was very useful and she is going into college fully informed of the work involved and how many people actually end up as doctors (not many). She often brings up things she learned at her forum. Maybe she had a very good group and leaders. She was hoping for a little information and she got a lot of information and a lot of fun while getting it. We realized the nomination thing probably came from the talent search at the Collegeboard and that most people got this but we figured in was a good overview on alot of information that D was interested in finding out and that turned out to be the case. By the way, there were quite a few people there who were scholarshiped by the program.</p>
<p>My younger daughter also received an invitation to their program for middle school kids and, after checking with the Superintendent that it wasn’t a scam but it was expensive, she went. It was one of the best experiences in her life and she grew and learned a great deal through her week.</p>
<p>We had a charity function in DC shortly before she was to go and I was speaking to a Senator regarding the program (she asked about my girls) and the Senator said it was a great program. Many, many elected officials speak and work at the conference with the kids and love doing so. </p>
<p>We were offered the Inaugural trip but decided against it as we figured it would be a zoo and our daughter does not like crowds. Common sense is really a parents responsibility. We have a friend who was recommended and went to the Medical Conference in LA last summer (after her junior year) and it confirmed her desire to major in science in college with an eye toward pre-med.</p>
<p>Is it for everyone? No. Is it somewhat less selective than they make it seem? Yes. Is it expensive? Sort of. But for the right kids it is truly a great, once in a lifetime opportunity. I certainly hope this article does not detract from the specialness of the program.</p>
<p>I’m inclined to agree with post nos. 13 and 14 above … my older son attended the National Youth Leadership Conference on International Diplomacy and Govt Relations held in Washington DC a few years ago. We took the money out of our mouths to send him. Still, it was an extremely positive experience from which my son made some college and other contacts while learning a great deal about topics that interested him very much. These conferences may not be for everyone, and I agree the way they are marketed is a bit deceptive but for students with passion and a genuine interest in the conference topics, they can be valuable and worthwhile experiences.</p>
<p>I went to JrNYLC, and it was great… went on a full scholarship, too. Can’t really agree with the article :P</p>
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<p>This is completely consistent with what I’ve said in the past - if you’ve done a program like this and it’s in context of an area of interest that you’ve pursued, and/or you can do a good job of describing its impact on you - it can be a positive. In and of itself though , it’s clearly not. I do object to the marketing, however. Sounds like the inauguration week did not give participants the advertised access - that may have been a legitimate glitch. All in all, I thought this was a pretty balanced and fair article.</p>
<p>It’s funny that they mentioned People to People. I remember receiving those in middle school and really wanting to go- I even went to several of the info sessions, but my parents couldn’t afford it, so I never had the chance.</p>
<p>I’m concerned because in our area the only kids I know of who have gone on these are:
- first generation college attenders whose parents are taken in by the rhetoric and worry that their kids will be losing out if they don’t attend
- Kids of recent immigrants whose parents also seem to overvalue the results of these programs.</p>
<p>That to me does seem predatory. The kids I know who have gone on these programs are overwhelmingly working class and in each case the parents seem to feel that it’s a ticket to Harvard. I have this feeling that these may be many of the same people who’ve been taken in by predatory mortgage and loan companies. </p>
<p>And FWIW, the ones that they send your kids where the conference or seminar is basically a ten-day trip to Europe? The foreign service people loathe having to brief these groups at the embassies – mostly because the kids tend to be ill-prepared, way too young to appreciate a program like this, and because the person doing the briefing is required to act like it’s a serious academic program when it’s not. </p>
<p>BTW, every member of our family, including our dog was invited to the People to People program this year. We won’t be going . .</p>
<p>The same can be said for the whole “summer program” industry really, with just some exceptions. </p>
<p>I think there are literally thousands of summer programs can be great if a) parents can afford it b) the parents and kids know exactly what they are getting for the money and c) the kids get something great out of the experience. What I object to is misleading advertising that implies the product is something it is not. Sure people get fooled-- if they didn’t, such questionable practices would not be used. Sure it’s buyer beware and I’m not about to suggest regulation, but it doesn’t make it any less unethical. </p>
<p>To give an example, I know some kids from immigrant families (and this is also true for the many who live outside the US and want to go to US schools), who are sending their kids to top universities for a summer program, actually believing it would help them with admissions to that school. But the only thing in common between this particular summer program and the university is that the summer program RENTS SPACE from the university. There is no connection whatsoever. The ‘faculty’ are a bunch of people without any college teaching experience if you dig deeper. This may all be obvious to savvy parents on CC, but not to many others it seems. It’s why camps renting facilities at the top schools can charge huge amounts more than those hosting the same kind of thing at a lesser known school. </p>
<p>I am sure in most cases the kids will have a blast, as they would at any live-away summer camp or travel experience with other teens. Whether it will educate them or give them some kind of leg up (which is what the parents often think they are paying for) is a different matter.</p>