Summer camps and the class divide

The first American summer camps — Gunnery Camp in 1861 in a loose form, then a wave of more organized operations in the 1880s and 1890s — were not folk institutions. They were designed objects, built by educators and clergymen and YMCA reformers who had a theory about what was wrong with urban boys. The theory, in short, was that civilization had gone too far. Boys raised on streetcars and parlor games would lack the vigor to run the empire their fathers were building. Camp was a deliberate corrective: cold lake, hard bunk, fire, axe, silence. The customers, naturally, were the families who could afford to send a boy away for eight weeks and who already worried that their sons might be too soft to inherit anything. The class character was baked in at the cornerstone.

While elite camps were charging premium fees, a different stream of summer programming served working-class urban children: the Fresh Air Fund (founded 1877), settlement-house outings, parish picnics, and various charitable excursions that took tenement kids to the country for days or weeks. These were framed therapeutically — health, morals, escape from the slum — rather than developmentally. The elite camp child was being formed; the Fresh Air child was being rescued. That distinction in framing tracked an actual distinction in dosage. A formed child gets eight weeks every summer for ten summers. A rescued child gets two weeks once or twice. The cumulative gap, over a childhood, is enormous, and it shows up in adult networks.

A traditional sleepaway camp in northern New England today runs roughly 12,000 to 16,000 dollars for a seven-week session, before travel, uniforms, and the "tip pool" for counselors. Specialty camps — sailing, riding, certain music programs — go higher. This is not the top of the market; the top is invitation-only and barely advertised. At these prices, the customer base is necessarily a narrow slice of the professional and capital-owning classes, and the camps function as feeders into the same prep schools and selective colleges those families already attend. The camp is not a meritocratic gate. It is a node in a network that already exists.

Between sleepaway and parks-and-rec sits the day-camp tier: church camps, JCC camps, nature-center camps, art camps, the better Y operations. Prices run from a few hundred dollars a week to a couple thousand. For dual-earner middle-class families, this tier is not enrichment so much as load-bearing childcare with a thematic veneer. The veneer matters less than people admit. Most of what a 9-year-old needs from summer — adult supervision, peers, outdoor time, a few skills — is delivered roughly equally across this tier. The class signaling kicks in higher up and lower down; the middle is, for once, mostly functional.

Municipal recreation programs once did serious work: free or near-free day camps in every neighborhood, run out of school buildings and parks, staffed by college students on summer break. Post-Proposition 13, post-2008, post-COVID, that infrastructure has been hollowed in most American cities. Programs that survive often charge fees that defeat the point, run shorter hours that don't cover a working parent's day, and lack the staffing to do anything beyond keep children alive in a gym. The bottom of the market has been allowed to rot, and the families who rely on it have no political voice loud enough to stop the rotting.

The standard policy frame for low-income summer programs is "summer learning loss" — the documented backslide in test scores between June and September, disproportionately affecting poor children. The frame is not wrong, but it is narrow. It treats summer as a problem of academic decay rather than as a problem of childhood architecture. A child who spends ten summers in unstructured screen time and supervised tedium loses more than reading scores; she loses the chance to form a peer culture, to learn a sport, to find an adult mentor outside her family, to see a body of water. Reducing the question to test prep is how a society avoids paying for actual summers.

Jewish summer camps — Ramah, Habonim, the Reform movement's network, hundreds of independent operations — built one of the most successful counter-models in American camping. Many were founded to serve immigrant and second-generation kids at prices their families could manage, with subsidies layered in. The result was a continental network of belonging that did real work knitting a diasporic minority into a coherent American community. The lesson is not that other groups should copy Jewish camp; the lesson is that when a community decides camp is infrastructure rather than luxury, it builds the institutions and finds the money. Most American communities have not made that decision.

Black-run summer camps — many church-affiliated, some union-affiliated, a few independent — operated throughout the 20th century under conditions that elite white camps did not face: hostile neighbors, restricted access to lakes and beaches, harder fundraising, segregated supply chains. Some, like Camp Atwater in Massachusetts (founded 1921), built durable institutions that still operate. Many did not survive integration, ironically, as middle-class Black families gained access to formerly white camps and the parallel institutions lost their customer base. The pattern is familiar from Black banks, Black colleges, Black newspapers: integration without reciprocal investment hollows the older institution and rarely fully integrates the new one.

Camps run on cheap young labor — counselors paid in room, board, nostalgia, and a small stipend. The economics only work because 19-year-olds will accept a summer of 90-hour weeks for 2,000 dollars and the chance to be in charge of something. This labor model is fragile. Rising wages elsewhere, visa restrictions on foreign counselors, mental-health load on staff, and the general decline of the gap-year-counselor pipeline have all squeezed it. Camps that survive are increasingly those that can pass costs to families, which raises prices, which narrows the customer base, which deepens the class divide. The labor model and the class divide are linked, and fixing one without the other is hard.

Something specific happens when a child sleeps away from her family for weeks at a time among peers in a strange place: she forms a self that her parents did not assemble. This is one of the genuine goods of sleepaway camp, and it is hard to replicate. Boarding school does it but at a cost most families won't bear. Long visits to grandparents do a weaker version. Day camp does not do it at all. The class issue here is not just access to a service; it is access to a developmental experience, and the experience is unevenly distributed in ways that show up in adult capacity for independence, risk, and self-direction.

Many traditional camps run on sibling preferences, alumni preferences, and informal but real waitlist favoritism for the children of former campers. This is not unique to camp — colleges, clubs, and parishes do versions of it — but it is unusually concentrated. A camp founded in 1910 that has selected for legacy families since 1930 is, by 2026, four generations into a quiet hereditary system, and the cultural homogeneity of the camper population reflects it. The institutions are not malicious; they are just doing what institutions do when nobody forces them to do otherwise. Forcing them otherwise requires customers, donors, or regulators willing to make a fight of it.

A serious municipal summer program would offer every child in a city, regardless of income, eight weeks of supervised outdoor play with peers in their age range, swimming instruction to competence, two or three durable skills (a sport, an instrument or craft, a basic outdoor skill), and at least one trip more than a day long. The cost per child, done well, is not enormous — a few thousand dollars, less than a single month at a private camp. The political will to spend it does not exist in most American cities. Naming the absence is the first step toward fixing it; pretending the absence is natural is how it persists.

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