Recently Stephen Wolfram, who founded Summer Programs, had live Q&A at Reddit AMA. There he got a question from a participant about Summer School and this is the quote of Stephen's answer.
Question: I have a choice to go to a few summer schools. Any key points why should i choose the one your company runs?
Stephen Wolfram: We have two main programs: a summer school for "grownups" (centered on undergraduates and grad students, but with others too), and a summer camp for high-school students. I think they're both very successful, but I'll concentrate on the summer school, since that's what I think you asked about.
I think it's a completely unique program. We've been doing it for 14 years now, and it's been great. We have very interesting students from all over the world (a remarkably diversity of countries, fields of study, etc.) The instructors at the summer school are mostly R&D employees at our company, and essentially all of them are actually alumni of the summer school. In a sense they're outrageously overqualified for what they're doing at the summer school, but the summer school has become a favorite "intellectual vacation" for a bunch of our top R&D folk.
The goal at the summer school is to get every student to do an interesting, original project that fits with their personal goals. I think we've developed a really good way to come up with projects for students over the years. I end up ultimately being the person who picks the projects (I haven't been a professor for real for a quarter of a century, but I often call the summer school my annual "extreme professoring" moment).
I always enjoy being at the summer school, and spending time with all the students there. We end up hiring quite a number of people every year from the summer school. And it seems like people who come to the summer school meet a very interesting collection of students and instructors who they end up keeping in touch with.
I don't know of any other summer schools that try to do something as ambitious as ours in getting people to do real, original projects in a small number of weeks (3 in our case). I'm hoping we can "franchise" our summer school, because I think a lot of people would get benefit from what we do there.