Tip of the Iceberg: The Role of Summer Melt in the Postsecondary Pathway

• In Event: 63.018 - Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

“Summer melt” is when students who plan to attend change their mind over the summer and decide not to enroll (Castleman & Page, 2014b). A limitation of the summer melt literature to date is its exclusive focus on “college-intending” students—individuals who are accepted to college and signal their intent to enroll the fall following high school graduation.1 Limiting analyses in this way ignores talent loss early in postsecondary pathway and obscures the true summer melt prevalence. Additionally, there is little information on the students who summer melt. A deeper understanding of this group may allow schools to identify the warning signs and freeze melt before it starts. This study seeks to examine the phenomenon of summer melt by determining how it fits in the pathway to college and by understanding the characteristics of students who summer melt. It also tests whether summer melt is a signal of something else, a downward high school trajectory, which can be identified prior to the summer after high school.
Data come from the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS), a nationally-representative survey of sophomores. Similar to Castleman & Page (2014a), I consider students who were accepted to college and submit the FAFSA “college-intending.”2 A difference between my study and theirs is that I do not limit the sample to the college-intending; doing so would prevent me from examining the prevalence of summer melt and comparing it to talent loss earlier in the postsecondary pathway. To determine whether summer melters are on downward high school trajectories, I generate an index utilizing IRT. The index uses items from the 10th and 12th grade surveys to measure how academic behaviors change over time. Before estimating the IRT model, I classify each variable pair into four categories: consistently low, faller, riser, and consistently high.3

Author

• Brian Holzman, Stanford University