Harvard Students Need Summer School

Forget Phineas and Ferb. 104 days of summer vacation is too much.

Indeed, Harvard’s summer break this year clocked in at 108 days, and that is simply too long. However, the solution is not just shortening the summer holiday. Instead, we can come up with a more creative use of that time — one that furthers Harvard’s academic mission. Namely, the College should require students to attend summer school.

First, let me clarify that I’m not in favor of doing away with summer entirely. The first few weeks are a much-needed time of rejuvenation, and the mere promise of the vacation acts as a light at the end of the tunnel during the long spring semester.

However, there are problems with such a long summer break. At least in my experience, a prolonged period away from school has a diminishing marginal return for relaxation — as is the case with our winter break. How much good does the fourteenth week of summer actually add?

Moreover, the three-plus months we spend away from the classroom may make us forget what we’ve learned — contrary to the College’s academic mission. As Harvard seeks to bring students’ attention back to the classroom, it should reimagine its schedule to actively promote this mission.

The best way to do so is by requiring Harvard students to attend summer school. This proposal may sound outlandish, but it’s already in place elsewhere.

For example, students at public universities in Florida have to earn nine credit hours during a summer semester.

Dartmouth College, likewise, requires its students to stay on campus for at least one summer. Students typically choose to remain during the summer after their second year, creating a tradition known as “sophomore summer.” The semester turns into a bonding experience for students to share almost exclusively with other members of their class year.

(To anyone worried about whether Harvard would still be able to run and profit from its other summer programs: Dartmouth hosts a pre-college summer program for high school students concurrent with its sophomore summer.)

To reap the benefits of the summer semester, students don’t need to spend every summer at Harvard — just one would be enough, as is the case at Dartmouth.

There is another aspect of Dartmouth’s system that Harvard should adopt; in exchange for spending one summer at the college, students get to choose a different semester to be away from campus — an eye for an eye.

So, in addition to forming connections with peers, a summer semester would also help to shake up the College’s impervious extracurricular culture. During the summer, students would be on a mostly empty campus, likely with no extracurricular programming. There, they would be free to focus on their academics — and maybe even have some free time left over for once in their lives.

Besides, most students presently seem to spend their summers working an internship. In effect, this means that “vacation” is a misnomer, since the summer is used not for relaxing but toiling away on jobs. The College need not protect or prioritize pre-professional pursuits.

But for the career-concerned students who care not for Harvard’s academic mission, trading a summer semester for a spring or fall away from campus could actually make it easier to secure an internship.

Summer internships are often highly competitive, since almost every college student is looking to work during the summer. Conversely, term-time internships are essentially constrained by geography; I can’t work an internship in San Francisco if I’m stuck in Cambridge during the fall.

Harvard students can work smarter, not harder. Rather than competing for the limited pool of summer jobs, students at the College would apply for term-time internships anywhere in the world during the spring or fall.

I, for one, look forward to a future where Gov concentrators are running Washington, D.C., year-round.

Above all, adding a summer semester would shake up the monotony of our schedule so that life doesn’t become, well, routine. Hopefully, we would all think more carefully about how we spend our time.

And of course, the biggest advantage of spending the summer at Harvard rather than the fall or spring semesters is the better weather. I would gladly swap a dreary Boston winter for the warm dog days of summer.

Matthew R. Tobin ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Social Studies and Economics in Winthrop House.