@DreamerMom, not sure if you still need advice now. My own experience is from the Dark Ages. I enrolled in an Ivy at 16. I was still physically maturing – and grew at least an inch my freshman year. I had no difficulty academically – I graduated magna cum laude in a STEM field at a university in which honors were hard to get. But, socially, I would have been better off doing something that let me develop more social skills. I think I wasn’t as confident as I should have been academically either. A gap year might have helped there.
When I was in grad school at another Ivy (I attended 3 of HYPMS and taught at one), I had a 19 year old in the second year of his PhD program in math across the hall from me. Brash, immature, but interesting and not surprisingly pretty smart. I have kept in touch with him over the years and I think he made a number of questionable career decisions. I think he would have benefitted from slowing down his pace.
Normally, I would strongly recommend a gap year. I don’t know what a gap year will be like in 2020-2021. Also, if the 2021 academic year is largely virtual, then I don’t know that my advice to take a gap year would be that sensible.
Assuming 2021-2022 will be on campus, let me relay my son’s experience. My son took a gap year after graduating from HS. He didn’t even take SATs/ACTs or apply to college until the fall of his gap year. It was a different era, but we didn’t have an organized pre-planned gap year program (he hates organized programs). He campaigned for a Presidential candidate, worked on finishing a novel with a co-author (who somehow couldn’t do her part), was a research assistant at a local university, worked on improving his reading fluency with a grad student at a local university, studying painting/drawing, playing in adult Ultimate Frisbee and basketball leagues, and doing an internship with a State Superior Court judge who had judged the finals of his HS’s moot court competition. He also had a serious surgery that we had deferred to the gap year. He got in to some very good schools, did extremely well at one of them, and has been very successful since then.
He says that the extra year of maturity benefitted him. He was always a HIGHLY goal-oriented kid (perhaps an understatement) but he thought the extra year helped him focus in his freshman year.
So, one can succeed going to school early. It may not handicap some folks, but I would have preferred to have taken a gap year, my across the hall neighbor in my grad dorm probably would have benefitted greatly from taking a gap year, and my son believes that taking a gap year did help him.
I hope this is helpful.