Undecided: navigating life and learning after high school

Gap Years

Agap year is distinguished from “time off” in that it is— usually—a set amount of structured time (usually a year) taken by a student between high school and college. Generally, these students have already been accepted to a school and defer for the year to gain real-world experience and take a break from academics. The accepted idea around a gap year is that there is an established date when you will be going back to school. This is not an open-ended arrangement, which makes it much easier for parents to endorse, and even fund. As I mentioned in Part Two, I highly recommend going through the paces junior and senior year and applying to some colleges that you can get into. Once they accept you, you can defer (usually for at least one or two years) and do your own thing; but this way you will have your college acceptance to fall back on and your enrollment date to help you structure your time—like a deadline.

Taking time off between high school and college is not only fun, but might be the smartest decision you could make for your long-term happiness. Gap years are great antidotes for academic burnout and struggling grades, or if you lack motivation or conviction about getting a college degree. More and more teens are taking a gap year and experiencing real, measurable benefits, including increased self-knowledge, better GPA and graduation rates upon returning to school, and better job satisfaction. There is a formal association that spells it all out for you and your parents. It’s the American Gap Association (americangap.org) and defines a gap year this way: “A structured period of time when students take a break from formal education to increase self-awareness, learn from different cultures, and experiment with possible careers. Typically these are achieved by a combination of traveling, volunteering, interning, or working. A gap year experience can last from two months up to two years and is taken between high school graduation and the junior year of their higher degree.”

The American Gap Association provides a list of accredited gap year organizations that is growing every month. Holly Bull, president of the Center for Interim Programs, has counseled more than a thousand students through the gap year process. During that time, she has found that the gap year offers creative time to explore areas of interest in a hands-on way and gain clarity regarding what to focus on in college and, ultimately, in the work world after college.

COLLEGE–REAL WORLD DISCONNECT

Over the past couple of decades there’s been a big push for everyone to go to college right after high school, whether they want to or not. It’s a dying trend because it doesn’t really work. According to the National Center of Education Statistics, only 54 percent of incoming freshmen will graduate within six years. And those who do graduate face a job market that has less and less use for that shiny liberal arts degree. According to a 2012 poll, 44 percent of last year’s college graduates are living at home with their parents, and most of those graduates want to work in education, media and entertainment, and health care, when most of the jobs openings are in engineering and computer science. There is a big disconnect, and nobody seems to have real answers for solving it.

Why is college still the default when nearly half of students don’t finish, and nearly half of graduates can’t find meaningful work they spent a lot of money and time training to do? According to one high school guidance counselor, Doug Drew, the simple truth is that not all of us are meant to be scholars. Nor can most of us afford to be scholars these days. Some of us also need to learn how to be butchers, and bakers, and candlestick makers, and alpaca growers, and river guides. A gap year is a chance to explore other talents and interests unrelated to school that might have real usefulness, even if only to convince you that what you want is to go back to studying. Drew failed out of college after three semesters and took his own self-designed gap year by cycling alone cross-country for eight months, pedaling directly into the wind. He attributes his ability to go back to college, earn a 3.5 GPA, and graduate with a job to that grinding experience.

Holly Bull puts it this way: “The gap year provides a sense of relevance ... to the world. It offers time to rejuvenate after the more onerous aspects of twelve years of schooling. And there is a level of self-confidence and self-knowledge gained through taking on the world outside of the formal classroom that is powerful and unique for one’s teens and early twenties. A high percentage of gap year students have a clearer idea of a college major or at least more in-depth knowledge of what they do not want to pursue in college classes. And, on a practical level, students are building a résumé that can help them get jobs down the line.”

RISKS OF TAKING A GAP YEAR

What are they? Well, the first one is that you’ll spend your time unproductively, and I’m doing my best in this book to ensure that doesn’t happen. The second is that you will be out of sync with your peers when you go back to school, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue in reality.

Here’s Holly Bull on the subject again: “Students are often concerned that they will fall behind their high school classmates or be too old coming into freshman year at college. What they find, however, is that they are really on a parallel track with their college peers and usually encounter other gap year students during their year. If there is a disjoint, it can happen during freshman year because gap year students are invariably more mature and focused compared to their peers.”

Another worry is that you will forget everything you learned in elementary school and high school, and flunk out of college. Again, the opposite is more true. Bob Clagett, who worked in Harvard University admissions for years and then served as dean of admission at Middlebury College, found that incoming Middlebury freshmen who took time off between high school and college had GPAs higher than those of their peers right through senior year. He ran the numbers for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the GPA results were the same: gap year students surpass their peers throughout their four years of college.

The final concern is that you will never go back to school. Researchers Karl Haigler and Rae Nelson studied 280 gap year students from 1997 to 2006 and collected an enormous quantity of data they published in a report called “The Gap Year Advantage” (you can see it at americangap.org). They discovered that nine out of ten gap year students, or 90 percent, go back to school within a year. If you wind up being part of the 10 percent who don’t, you probably will have found something to do that fulfills you more than studying, which, truth be told, is the essence of getting a life.

PAYING FOR A GAP YEAR

The same rules apply here as they do for traveling. Your gap year can be expensive or cheap, depending on where you go and what you want to do. Working and saving for your gap experience should be part of the overall plan. You might have to work as you go in wherever your gap year takes you, or you might prefer to get a job and live at home for a set amount of months and save up for the rest of the year. When thinking about cost, don’t forget to average in what you might save in tuition costs by coming back from your time off re-invigorated and ready to get your degree as efficiently as possible. The less student debt you incur, the better, but if an investment in a gap year leads to a quicker degree, more hands-on experience, and a better job on the other side, the money spent will be well worth it.