When I wrote “lower class” gap year, it was not restricted to lower income people. The examples I know of from upper income families did the “lower class” gap year(s) (work or military service) after flaky high school records and/or initial lack of interest in college, which seems similar to your kid’s situation.
On the other hand, most discussion of gap years on these forums seems to be focused on potentially expensive enrichment activities to improve the student’s application the next year after being shut out (“upper class” gap year). There does not seem to be much discussion about “lower class” gap years, or students admitted to Harvard etc. deciding to defer entry.
@JHS, I don’t think gap years are voluntarily taken by most Europeans, or rather, most Brits. For the English, their college A-Levels are roughly equivalent to our freshman year (but spread over 2 years).
To the OP: I was once your age and I know kids your age really really care what their peers think. Evolution actually selected for that behavior. But once you reach college, absolutely zero people will think negatively of you because you took a gap year. If you round, roughly zero people will even care if you took a gap year or not.
Good question! Keeping skills sharp is likely a concern for some parents. I think some gap year programs include a few courses to earn college credits, but they don’t seem to be STEM courses (usually writing and humanities type courses).
Has anyone ever seen any research that demonstrates college-ready students who take a single gap year are more mature when they begin college? More likely to graduate on time? Because I bet some parents worry their kid might get too rusty over the year and it will negatively impact their preparation. But research dispelling that would be helpful.
I came across an article last week that said a gap year for low income students isn’t wise at all. They’re far more likely to never actually to college. The gap year low income students isn’t usually well thought out, disorganized, just puts them in a big hole, with blunted academic skills.
The “lower class” gap years are typically not planned gap years, or emergency gap years after being shut out of colleges that one applies to. More typically, they are due to the high school graduate not being immediately interested in going to college, and/or having a high school record obviously too poor to go to a four year college. It is only after work or military service that the person becomes interested in college (perhaps because then s/he sees that high school graduate work or enlisted military service is not that attractive a long term career for him/her) and gains the maturity to commit to college (often starting at community college).
This is quite different from the “upper class” gap years that are either planned enrichment activities, or emergency measures after being shut out and not wanting to start at a community college or less selective college.
My daughter is on a gap year of a different sort, between college and grad school, but she frequently says how much she wishes she had done one between high school and college. @aboveaverage , it sounds like your main worry is what your friends will think if you decide to take a year off. Some may think it’s because you didn’t get in anywhere decent–that’s your main concern, right?–but you have to do what is best for your future.
If you decide to do this, take the time to learn a valuable skill. A family friend became an EMT before starting at Harvard, and ended up keeping his job all through college. He’s now a junior there. You can tell your friends that you will go to college year after next, but first, you’re going to learn how to build cellos, or something like that. That will only help your application when you apply to college.
I did a gap year before grad school as well. A friend of mine and I got a grant to travel around the country to photograph and do research on the history of firehouses. Columbia was happy to hold my admission a year. My son’s girl friend worked for an NGO in New York for a year while she applied to PhD programs. She just felt she couldn’t really enjoy senior year applying to programs and she wasn’t 100% sure she wanted to be an academic. She got into excellent programs in her field and learned quite a bit about what it’s like to live in NYC working for an NGO.
Many eons ago I took a gap year. I’d taken Calculus as a senior and got a 2 on the AP exam. Still don’t know how that happened! So I retook Calc as a junior in college (so after three years of no math). It was so easy this time. I took it self paced, finished the final before the half-way mark and ended up being asked if I’d like to correct homework the next year. Senior year I took Physics 1. I’d had biology as a sophomore, and chemistry as a junior in high school. It was hard, but I hovered between an A- and B+ and ended up with a B+.
Perhaps because Princeton actively encourages gap year, that’s the topic that dominated the Q/A session at the Preview Day this past year. Even in one of the letters in the welcoming package, it encouraged looking into that possibility. And that was aside from their Bridge Year Program. My son wanted to take a gap year irregardless and I was all for it. In fact, I even encouraged my older son to take a gap year along so we could have family travels and otherwise family quality time together.
When we made our decision to take a gap year, we didn’t look around to see who else is doing it or what they might think of our decision. We did it for our own reason. Whether the idea is normalized now or not was totally immaterial. Why should it? You want to take a gap year, then take a gap year. If you’re thirsty, drink your water. Hungry? Then eat.
This gap year has been very fruitful, productive, memorable and rejuvenating for not just both my boys but for us as parents, too. For my older son, the gap year gave him some valuable pre-med opportunities, such as operating room shadowing, volunteer around the world in Panama, etc., while for my Princeton-bound son, he had an opportunity to open his music studio and currently teaching violin and piano to several students while producing music for his YouTube channel. Together, they continued to renew their tennis rivalry. They’re traveling together to Nashville next month for a tennis tournament. As a family we traveled to San Diego, Seattle, Canada, Chicago and later this summer, to South Korea for a month. At home we played Pickleball, tennis, hiking, and LOTS of cooking and eating. What NOT to like about gap year?
Oh, unlike my boys’ undistinguished gap year, look at what this Princeton-bound kid did during his gap year:
Obviously, our announcement was met with initial surprise, but pretty much everyone knew that taking a gap year is a trend nowadays. Among some of my son’s friends, I think there’s a tint of envy, i.e., “I wish I could be taking a gap year, too…” For them, though, they didn’t have any solid reasons for taking a gap year, so they headed off to college. For most of them, going off to college right after high school graduation is a matter of traditional habit and it’s something their parents expect them to do.
If you’re trying to gauge whether taking a gap year is a some sort of social stigma or not, rest assured. There wasn’t a single person around our circle that has ever felt that way. It’s a different matter, though, if you’re taking a gap year AFTER having your college destination secured or taking a gap year in order to secure a better college destination. I’m sure people’s perception would vary by a lot depending on your circumstance.
I think this would depend on the gap year reason…and the college.
If the student is deferring enrollment after acceptance, that student needs to contact their college about this.
If the student is taking a gap year and will be applying anew for the following year...they need to be careful that they are applying as incoming freshmen, and not as transfer students...especially if merit aid is a consideration and is awarded to incoming freshmen only. Also, some colleges accept a much lower %age of transfer students than first year applicants.
Again…the student needs to make sure that they find out the policies that would affect them at each college of interest.
besides americorps, does anyone know what are the other popular options for 1 year of service/volunteering? I think the minimum US military commitment is 2 years?
is it true malia obama did some youth state dept. program for her gap year? anyone know what that program is called?
I think college admissions people know what 17 years olds can’t see very well (and sometimes their parents in the throes of trying to get a kid launched forget as well) - one year between high school and college is a tiny blip in the course of an 80 year live. The kid has 60 years ahead of them – so what if they go to college with only 59 years ahead of them? And if they can use the gap year to mature, become a bit more interested and interesting (which colleges like), and gain a little perspective on what they want to do in their life, college LIKE that.
But as @doschicos said early in the thread, there is no guarantee that your admissions to a similar list of colleges would be any better in a year. If you aren’t happy with your admissions results this year, then a gap year can be a fine idea. But you probably want to retool your admissions list for next year, too, for schools that are more realistic for your stats if you strike out this year. I gave both my kids the options of taking a gap year if they wanted to, with the caveat that anything they did away from home had to be self supported (eg, au pair in a foreign country for a year would be an option). But I wasn’t going to pay anything significant for a gap year experience – they would have to figure that out if they weren’t going to be living at home and doing something productive from there. Neither took the option (not even the one that I thought would get the most benefit from another year of maturity before college). I actually felt strongly that having a year of less stress, more freedom, and exploration before starting college was a great once in a lifetime opportunity, so I would have been happy if they had taken me up on it.
One of my kids has a friend whose parent (doctor) paid for the kid to do a couple different exotic travel trips aimed at gap year kids. I think the parent didn’t know what to do – the kid didn’t like HS, and didn’t really want to go right to college. Parent agreed to a year of gap funding, and honestly could afford it (I couldn’t even if I wanted to). Kid came back, tried trade school and community college, has been doing restaurant work, and finally finished community college AA and transferred to the state flagship to work on a degree there. Running a couple years behind their HS peers who didn’t take a gap year, but seems like to finish a degree eventually. Parent seems okay with kid living at home as long as they are working and covering some of their own expenses and making degree progress.
@aboveaverage I think a lot of the competitive programs had deadlines that already passed. We were thinking of NSLY and it had a December deadline, but they also have just a summer programs which you might qualify for summer 2019. You might be able to combine that with 9 months of working (either in another country or here) and could end up with an interesting year. I know a lot of US resorts hire foreign students for their resort season and would imagine other countries do this too; how cool would it be to work at a ski resort in Chile, for example. You just have to dig around.
@aboveaverage - Malia Obama had a summer internship with the state dept that she (or possibly her parents) arranged directly - not through a formal program. (She would have needed to do that in any case because of all sorts of security concerns unique to her situation as the daughter of a then-sitting US President.)
Currently, at least 8 years if one includes the reserve duty, although active duty may be as low as 2 years in some cases. Many of the veteran examples are of non-traditional student age.
Also, some who are enlisted in military service apply and are admitted to the academies.
For obvious reasons, enlisted military service is not normally a pre-planned gap activity in the “upper-class” sense as usually discussed on these forums.