After-school or out-of-school programs offer additional social, academic, and extracurricular activities and experiences to supplement the regular school day. College preparation programs offer activities that are designed to enable youth to prepare for a variety of college-related tasks, with services including test preparation, academic tutoring, admissions essay writing, and assistance with college and financial aid applications. This paper provides a sense of what kinds of temporal sequencing within college preparation programs are most likely to be beneficial. The authors offer a brief definition of after-school programs, and then move on to a closer consideration of the timing of college preparation programs. [This report was published by the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis, Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California.]