Colleges award prizes, tuition for summer reading

PHILADELPHIA — Attention incoming college freshmen: Have you been procrastinating on that summer reading assignment? Don't blow it off any longer.

Some universities now offer essay contests in the fall that carry prizes from campus bookstore gift certificates to dinner with best-selling authors to a semester of free tuition.

The rite of summer reading, meant to give first-year students something in common and jump-start discussion, is often seen as a chore. Educators say competition and rewards are new ways to give the assignments a higher profile and stress their importance, though contest participation lags.

"It's a way of trying to value, even privilege, the project in the eyes of the students," said Frank Wcislo, the dean who oversees the program at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

Vanderbilt assigned its first summer reading this year — Greg Mortenson's best-selling "Three Cups of Tea," about an American's efforts to build schools in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Submitting an optional essay, blog entry, video or other form of analysis by Sept. 5 gives students the chance of winning a seat at a campus dinner with Mortenson later this year.

Likewise, insightful essays about "Children of Dust: A Memoir of Pakistan" will earn 10 freshmen at The College of Wooster in Ohio a chance to dine with author Ali Eteraz. The winning students' writings will be bound and presented to Eteraz.

Henry Kreuzman, dean for curriculum and academic engagement, said the optional contest is one element in giving students a richer experience with the text.

"We never really saw it as a reward for reading the book," Kreuzman said. "We saw it as an integrated intellectual exercise."

Kreuzman estimated about 25 percent of his incoming 630 freshmen will write essays by the Sept. 8 deadline. Wcislo (pronounced WISE-loh) said he expects fewer than 100 of Vanderbilt's 1,600 freshmen to submit an entry.

By contrast, all 900 incoming freshmen at La Salle University in Philadelphia are required to write essays about promoting economic justice, a core value of the Catholic school.

Last year, Olivia Armater, 19, of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., won first place — a semester of free tuition — for her essay on philanthropy. Five runners-up got thousands of dollars in aid.