Praxis Course: Data in Action: Non-Profits and Data
Semester: Spring 2026
Faculty Advisor/Professor: Jennifer Spohrer
Community Partner: PHENND/CASE
Praxis Site Supervisor: Hillary Kane and Janine Wright
Praxis Poster:
DSCI Faith Somers_Summer Melt Praxis Project Poster Final
Further Context:
This semester, we had the opportunity to work with the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development (PHENND), a network of over 25 colleges and universities that focuses on “service-learning, civic engagement, and community partnership in Philadelphia” (phennd.org).
The organization has many diverse programs relating to achieving these goals in the Philadelphia region (College Success Network, PHENND Sustainability, Democratic Civic Engagement, etc.). Our project has focused on college completion and success strategies, specifically on reducing summer melt in the transition from high school to college. Another
organization we worked with is the College Access and Success Ecosystem (CASE), a collective impact forum focused on increasing high school and college graduation rates for Philadelphia students. Our two partners at PHENND serve as the co-chairs for CASE’s On Track to College Graduation Action Team.
To begin our project, we spent some time on a literature review, investigating the most relevant and recent literature on National Summer Melt, to plan out how to shrink the scope to the Philadelphia area. They had defined Summer melt as, “the phenomenon of college-intending
students who have applied to, been accepted by, and made a deposit to a college or university, but fail to matriculate to that college (or any other) in the fall following their high school graduation”(MCAN). We were unsure whether this definition fully captured every institution’s protocol when considering the various dates a student could be considered melted or if an
enrollment deposit was the determining factor.
We wanted to broaden our understanding of institution-based Summer Melt, so we applied our learnings in forming qualitative questions for our prospective institutions. We brought the valuable insights from involved faculty within our communities, as well as the insights from weekly meetings with our PHENND partners, to begin our outreach to Philadelphia colleges and universities.
The outreach we performed was incredibly helpful, both for our project and for our individual learning. We were able to create a set of questions that we asked each institution that explored the way they thought about and handled summer melt. At first, we kept each of these survey sets in a document, and then later transferred all the information into a spreadsheet, which allowed us to explore the ways different types of institutions handled summer melt through visualizations. We identified that some of the top risk indicators included that a student had not planned out their bill payments and had not attended orientation, despite signing up.
We defined Summer Melt using the institutions for which the definition was intended. In collecting the responses of each Philadelphia area institution we interviewed, we have come up with this definition:When a high school graduate demonstrates verified intent to enroll in a postsecondary institution but does not matriculate by a defined cutoff date (such as the first day of classes). We also thought to dig deeper into who does not fall into the category of what Summer Melt is, i.e., students who formally defer enrollment or students who do not demonstrate verified intent (enrollment deposit, for example).
On March 24th, we had an amazing opportunity to attend a CASE meeting where each of their action teams presented short summaries of their recent successes and plans. We were also able to hear from Katharine Meyer, an expert in evidence-based principles for reducing summer melt, who gave us incredibly useful information on some specific tactics like behavioral nudges and messaging, counselor-led summer outreach, peer or near-peer support, and summer bridge programs. We encountered many of these topics in our early research, and it was very helpful to learn more about the specifics from Katharine. Lastly, this meeting gave us critical insight into
the importance of highly communicative, cross-departmental work that is necessary to implement anti-melt strategies. The format of CASE and their meetings modeled the communication and commitment needed from colleges and universities looking to reduce their summer melt rates.
Another opportunity we were given was to speak with Jim Ramey at UPenn, who works closely with UPenn’s High School programs. We were able to have a meeting with him about the uses of Slate (online program for postsecondary onboarding/admissions processes) for reducing summer melt. He uses Slate to monitor student progress through post-deposit enrollment checkpoints. Ramey reads them as behavioral signals: students who stop engaging with checklist items after paying their deposit are flagged as high risk for melt and contacted directly. Our takeaways from this meeting were in line with the information we had gathered from all of
our other meetings with institutions. For example, Ramey emphasized UPenn’s previous issues with data disconnections across their different schools that have summer programs. There is often no centralized view of a student’s status. Additionally, he highlighted that effective melt prevention is labor-intensive, something we had also come across as a barrier for other institutions. Lastly, Ramey underscored the importance of human verification of checklist completion tasks. Students often accidentally turn in the wrong documents or miss a step of a task, meaning that automated completion indicators must be audited by staff. It was amazing to see the inside working of Slate, and this meeting helped us solidify the strengths and constraints of our project.
In the future, we would love to see more investigation into the summer melt practices at institutions beyond the Philadelphia area. With broader/more data from different institutions, it would be great to develop some practical data analytics that would solidify what works best to reduce summer melt. We were able to learn about an example of a model that identifies high-risk students based on their summer checklist completion progress. We will base a lot of our recommendations on how an institution might be best able to move towards a similar model. Lastly, we are hopeful that there could be some developments between relationships among high school counselors and college onboarding teams. The trust students have built with their
guidance counselors and their proximity to those individuals is very helpful in reducing summer melt, however, most counselors are not employed on a 12-month schedule, only a 10-month.
This project and Praxis course was incredibly helpful for our personal developments and skillsets. We both learned a lot about communicating with outside institutions and effectively gathering data. We are very grateful for this opportunity to work with PHENND and CASE.