| This research was done by sociology professor Stefanie DeLuca; I'm sure it was published in a peer-reviewed journal. If anyone can find the reference we should look at that. The USA Today article doesn't give enough detail for us to look how they controlled for students being high-achieving and affluent.
The sample size is 11,000 graduating seniors; we don't know how they were selected, but we can see they included students who delayed community college entrance because of financial hardships or poor academic performance.
I think that maybe 1 out of 200 kids in the U.S. is the high-achieving sort that CC conventional wisdom suggests would really benefit from a gap year, so I think that there would be 55 kids like that in this sample of 11,000, and I don't think they can draw a conclusion from such a small sample. Again, we should read the journal article. | 
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