Surprise $200 million Summer Science Program

 

One big question is whether the program should expand beyond students already bent on a scientific career to reach the much larger population of students indifferent to science or lacking the opportunity to realize their potential. “It’s an elite program. That’s their brand,” says longtime observer Russell Moore, an integrative physiologist and provost at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder, one of four U.S. universities that host SSP students every summer. “And it’s a remarkable program for those students.”

“But it could also be remarkable for other types of students,” says Moore, who confesses that he “never would have gotten into” SSP as a teenager. “And $200 million opens up a lot of possibilities.”

SSP’s newfound wealth comes from Franklin Antonio, a 1969 SSP graduate who co-founded chipmaking giant Qualcomm and died last year at age 69. Deciding how to spend it falls to Frank Steslow, a veteran science museum administrator who became SSP’s chief executive in January.

Steslow says doubling the number of participants, increasing student financial aid, and seeking a more diverse pool of applicants are at the top of his list of options. But everything is on the table, he adds, including expanding beyond the program’s offerings in astrophysics, biochemistry, and genomics; providing activities for younger students; and offering professional development to middle and high school science teachers.

SSP was started in 1959 as a response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik and fears that the United States had lost its scientific edge. For decades, its only course was in astrophysics, where students worked in small teams to plot the orbital trajectory of one of thousands of uncharted near-Earth asteroids. In 2017 it began to offer biochemistry, asking students to design a molecule to block a fungal plant pathogen, and last year it added genomics. With an initial class of 26 students, SSP grew slowly for decades but has doubled in size in the past 6 years to a record 204 students this past summer.

The 6-week program caters to students who want to immerse themselves in science—data collection and analysis can run well into the evening after a day of classwork—and who have taken the prerequisite math courses in school. Richard Bowdon, who retired last year after serving as SSP’s executive director for 23 years, thinks its 3400 alumni are proof that the curriculum is appealing.

Despite its longevity, SSP is not well known among researchers who study science enrichment programs, and its impact has never been formally evaluated. The National Science Foundation funded it for 2 decades before deciding that SSP was too elitist. For the next 20 years it was managed by a California prep school that was also its home for 4 decades. In 1999, after the school pulled out, a handful of alumni—including Bowdon, class of 1974—rescued SSP from extinction by forming a nonprofit organization that signed up a handful of universities to host the program.

The program runs with a skeletal staff and a $4 million operating budget generated largely by tuition (now $8400) and alumni contributions. Its participants, all rising high school seniors, apply to top research universities, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) the most popular destination.

Bowdon, a software developer who believes passionately in SSP’s mission, and Moore, who was instrumental in bringing SSP to CU Boulder in 2015, shared their thoughts on the program with ScienceInsider.