Despite national calls to conceptualize education as a continuous P-16 system, most high schools cease to serve their students at the point of graduation. For their part, colleges provide relatively few students with formal bridge programs during the summer transition between secondary and postsecondary education. Even among low-income students accepted into four-year colleges with financial aid, the period between spring admission and fall matriculation features a "summer flood" in which graduates continue fundamental decision-making about where--and even whether--to attend college. Although this summer flood is familiar to secondary educators who work with low-income students, this phenomenon has been invisible in scholarly and policy circles. Pre-college enrollment changes can only be discovered by following students closely across the transition from high school to college. One such research project, the Big Picture Longitudinal Study (BPLS), uncovered the phenomenon of the summer flood. Begun in 2006 with funding from the Lumina and Irvine Foundations, the BPLS follows 500 graduates from over 50 innovative urban high schools that have gained national attention for graduating socioeconomically disadvantaged students of color and working in partnership with these students to assure their admission to college. The troubling gap between admission and matriculation led the authors to design a qualitative study with a specific focus on summer college planning among socioeconomically disadvantaged high school graduates who have already been accepted to college. They found that the Big Picture's exemplary college-going figures masked a summer pattern of ongoing deliberation about enrolling in college. Focus groups of transition counselors and school principals, and in-depth case studies with 13 recent Big Picture graduates, confirmed that the summer following graduation is a turbulent period for most of these high school graduates. (Contains 14 endnotes and a Bibliography.)