For fun this summer, Mario Zubia spent six hours a day, five days a week in a Caltech classroom studying neuroscience and physics. He topped it off with five hours of homework a night. And the 17-year-old Santa Maria resident did it by choice.
"Some of my friends are like, 'What's wrong with you?' " said Mario, chuckling. "A high school counselor told me about it. I always liked science and math, and it seemed like a great opportunity."
Teens such as Mario -- who eschew such summer rituals as hitting the beach in favor of hitting the books -- appear to be growing in number, according to high school and college administrators.
Students' specific goals vary: improving SAT scores, gilding college applications or just freeing up class schedules so they can fit in yet another Advanced Placement course or internship.
But their motivations are much the same: boosting their chances of getting into top colleges at a time that may be the toughest ever, thanks to a population peak of high school seniors, greater rates of college attendance and a stagnant number of college slots.
"It's more competitive today to get into your college of choice than ever before," said Carl Hampton, principal of Chino Hills High School.
Hampton said he was seeing more and more students taking summer classes and tutoring to burnish their college applications, including his nephew, who just enrolled at the Air Force Academy.
"Unfortunately, it's just something that's become necessary if you want to get ahead," he said. "To get accepted into some schools, the competition is so steep, and they have to decide if that's worth the price."
His nephew has no regrets, but Hampton said he worried that some students may miss out on the time to be carefree teenagers.
"I worry about that," he said. "I think some of the creativity gets kind of drilled out of them."
As a new school year begins, students such as Julia Chang, 16, who attends Oaks Christian School in Westlake Village, say the results will make their summer sacrifices worthwhile. The Calabasas resident spent eight weeks of her summer immersed in an SAT boot camp run by Elite Educational Institute, which was founded more than two decades ago in a Koreatown storefront and now runs 18 centers in California, six in Canada, five in South Korea and one in Thailand.
