Research shows students who take a gap year between high school and college do better once they get to school. By Margaret Loftus
Counselors usually encourage high school students who are considering taking a gap year to apply to college and defer their acceptance if necessary.(iStockphoto)
Long a rite of passage for affluent Brits, a gap year spent traveling, volunteering or working between high school and college is now really catching on among U.S. students.
A survey by the American Gap Association, a nonprofit that accredits companies that coordinate these stints, found that enrollment in respondents’ programs climbed 27 percent from 2012 to 2013.
Many students handle their own planning and logistics. But there’s a whole industry bidding for gap-year business, from the Pioneer Project, through which students learn skills like beekeeping and blacksmithing on a North Carolina farm, to Art History Abroad, which offers six-week courses in Italy.
“We aren’t creating demand,” says Alan Solomont, dean of Tufts’ Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service. “We’re responding to appetite.”
Burnout is one of the top reasons students take a break, according to an independent study of 280 gap-year participants by education policy experts Karl Haigler and Rae Nelson, authors of “Gap Year, American Style: Journeys Toward Learning, Serving, and Self-Discovery.” Subjects in the Haigler and Nelson study also cited a desire to find out more about themselves.
Kim Oppelt, a former school counselor, now community relations manager at education solutions provider Hobsons in Arlington, Virginia, says high school students used to have the time to sample a variety of electives, but they’re “now under pressure to take advanced courses in every subject for all four years of high school. This gives them little time to explore their true interests.”
And families increasingly “are looking for value. They’re thinking, ‘if I’m spending this much on college, I want every year to count,'” says AGA Executive Director Ethan Knight.
Recent Cornell University grad Wes Cornell says his year doing scientific research shaped his academic focus. In Costa Rica, he researched the health care of workers at coffee farms through Duke University’s Organization for Tropical Studies and did a program on sustainable development and tropical ecology with an environmental study abroad organization. He interned with the Colombia Nature Conservancy in Cartagena, and researched viral pathways at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
At Cornell, where he studied ecology and agriculture policy, he noticed classmates struggling to find themselves. “Having had time off, I was able to figure out what really interested me,” he says.
Research has shown that “gappers” perform better in school than their peers. A 2011 study at Middlebury College conducted by its former dean of admissions Robert Clagett found that students who had taken a year off had consistently higher GPAs than those who didn’t. “A lot of our students say when they enter as freshman that they have a greater sense of purpose in their studies,” says Princeton’s Bridge Year Director John Luria.
One goal of AGA is to make aid available to students to use for gap years so the experience isn’t available only to the affluent. But gap years don’t have to cost a fortune.
Programs sponsored by colleges typically cover part or most of the expense. At UNC, participants in the Global Gap Year Fellowship are granted $7,500 to develop their own six-month service experience. Princeton’s Bridge Year is a nine-month tuition-free program that places small groups at sites in five countries – Brazil, China, India, Peru and Senegal – to do service projects.
Kicking off in the fall of 2015, Tufts’ 1+4 program is aimed at democratizing the gap experience. “When we looked at our own data in terms of students who have deferred admission to take a gap year on their own, they are disproportionately self-paying,” says Solomont. “We want to make sure students who need financial assistance aren’t precluded, so we’ll provide aid.”
The program will place participants in service organizations domestically and internationally.
Counselors typically encourage studentsweighing a year off to apply to college anyway, and defer acceptance if they decide to go for it.
On the other hand, “it may be the case that waiting to apply during the gap year could improve your chances of getting in the school of your choice,” says Haigler, who once worked as a college counselor. “You might also find a school that is more suited to your evolving interest, the skills and knowledge you develop and what you learn about yourself.”
Gap Year 