Early College Awareness

Planning Your Event
Resources and Links

According to the Harvard Impact Study, Education is the #1 focus for alumni volunteer efforts. Early College Awareness (ECA) provides Clubs, SIGs, and individual classes with a meaningful and easily doable community service program designed to help students and parents understand that a college education is an achievable goal. 

The ECA program is not an admission recruitment program for Harvard. The purpose of the program is two-fold. ECA aims to actively engage middle and high school students who don’t think college is an option, or who might be the first in their family to consider attending a college, and gives greater assurance to young students and their families that attending and paying for college is a realistic goal. ECA provides further purpose to alumni/ae seeking to extend their involvement in education beyond Harvard-centric efforts such as interviewing and Prize Book.

ECA program options range from a single school assembly presentation on “college is achievable for all” to classroom speaker programs that “Make The Curriculum Real” through professional and personal alumni stories to half and full-day events held jointly with local community partners. ECA can work at a single school, or across a wider geographic area; and in ways that require little or no expense to Clubs, SIGS, or classes. 

To learn more about HAA’s Early College Awareness program, please review the following presentation from the 2017 Early College Awareness Webinar as well as the ECA toolkit including PowerPoint presentations. 

If you’re interested in learning more about ECA and assistance in launching a program, please contact Larry Kahn, Peter Mazareas, or clubs@harvard.edu.