International - Summer camps

Summer camps entertain, educate and give kids a competitive edge

IN A classroom at Imperial College London, students sit hunched over laptops, typing lines of code. Just nine years old, they are attending Firetech, a British technology summer camp for children. Courses include “Junior Augmented Reality” and “Creating for YouTube”. Such programmes are proliferating in many countries. They pander to two common demands from well-off parents: to entertain children over the long summer holidays and to give them a leg-up over their peers.

At most American summer camps children still commune with nature and sing around a campfire. But some camps cater to more niche interests, such as neuroscience, outer space or even atheism. Tom Rosenberg, chief executive of the American Camp Association, says a growing number focus on skills in demand at modern workplaces. The proportion offering science, technology, engineering or maths programmes, for instance, rose from less than a quarter in 2014 to almost a third in 2017.

Students often have an eye on university. Alexandra Boyt and David Stephenson, who run a residential Latin camp in western England, say a lot of students come to prepare for interviews at Oxford and Cambridge. Princeton asks applicants how they spent their past two summers. Entry to the camps themselves can be competitive. Canada/USA Mathcamp accepts just 15% of applicants.

In East Asia some parents use the summer to boost their children’s English skills. In a packed classroom at SNT Academy, a private language school in an affluent part of Seoul, the South Korean capital, a group of eight- and nine-year-olds practise debating (topic: should cosmetic surgery be banned?). Many wealthy Chinese parents go further, sending their children on study tours abroad. Ctrip, a Chinese travel agency, believes that 1m Chinese students will go on such trips this year, spending $4.5bn.

The fanciest summer programmes can be expensive. Firetech charges £1,300 ($1,700) for week-long residential courses; a week at Space Camp, in Huntsville, Alabama, can cost up to $1,200. Mr Rosenberg says there is a camp for every budget. But as wealthier parents splash out on ever more specialised programmes, it is getting harder for the less well-to-do to keep up in the summer-camp arms race.