<p>Andi, The Chronicle of Education has a very long article on how college admissions offices view applications from gap year students. It is too long to post here (I will put some excerpts below) but if you’d like a copy, please PM me with your email and I’d be happy to send the full article to you.</p>
<p>“If at First They Don’t Succeed”</p>
<p>When the letters from colleges arrived in Matthew Savage Aibel’s mailbox in the spring of 2004, he was not thrilled with the news. Despite his 1420 SAT and good grades, the most competitive colleges to which he had applied, including Georgetown and Yale, rejected him. Hamilton College, a selective college that accepts only about a third of its applicants, admitted him, but Mr. Aibel thought he could do better. He defrerred at Hamilton and took a year off.</p>
<p>Most applicants who aim high end up settling for a college somewhere down the food chain…But Mr. Aible, who graduated in 2004 from Milton Acacdemy, a private school in Milton, Mass., refused to settle for a “safety school.” At the urging of a private-college counselor, Mr. Aible took a gap year to study at Oxford Tutorial College, in England…Mr. Aibel is among a small but growing number of students who continue to pursue slots at highly selective colleges after striking out the first time. While some admissions deans believe that a handful of applicants are usuing unethical strategies to achieve their dream, gap years pay off for dozens - perhaps hundreds - of students like Mr. Aibel.</p>
<p>The gap-year startegy is most common among students from affluent families. As one college counselor says, “Prep school kids who thought it was their birthright to get into a Harard, Yale or Princeton are ending up at Muhlenberg, and their parents can’t get their heads around it…”</p>
<p>Mr Gilpin says a gap-year applicant is likely to get a closer look in the freshman admissions process if only because essays from high school seniors can all begin to seem the same to deans. "You’re likely to have your application seen in a different way, he says.“You’ve singled yourself out, and that’s a good thing…”</p>
<p>For Mr. Aibel, the strategy worked - eventually. He applied ED to Cornell during his gap year, but did not get in. In a second round of early decision, he applied to Washington University in St. Louis, and the deadline was late enough to allow him to submit his first semester grades from Oxford Tutorial…Washington offered Mr. Aibel admission…</p>
<p>College admissions deans have mixed feelings about the practice, however…{because] each year many selective colleges see about a half dozen students accept tehir offers of admission, request a deferral and then not show up on campus the following year. Because those students have been accepted elsewhere [some]admissions deans view that strategy as an unethical aiation on double-depositing…</p>
<p>Admissions experts caution students that travel and volunteerism alone are not likely to sway a college to move an application from the reject to the admit pile. “If a kid didn’t have successful results, most like the reasons are academic,” says Theodore O’Neill, dean of admissions at the University of Chicago. “You can do good works or live an interesting life, but that’s not going to address those core issues…”</p>