If you asked a typical high schooler what a successful education looks like, they would most likely mention getting good grades in high school, going straight to a prestigious university and ultimately ending up with a good job. But one thing most people wouldn’t think to mention is a gap year.
With the intense social stigmas that surround the college admissions process, choosing to take a gap year instead of heading directly off to college is not only a rare decision, but also one that is unfortunately frowned upon.
Gap years should not be viewed as a waste of a year, but rather as an important opportunity for young people to discover new sides of themselves before they enter college.
There should be more emphasis on persuading young people to take a constructive gap year rather than just following the beaten path of heading straight to college.
It’s worth noting that a gap year is definitely not just a 12-month vacation. Studies by the University of Sydney show that the people who gain the actual advantages in college tend to be the ones who work, do service or learn a new language.
In a study done for the book The Gap-Year Advantage, researchers found that 60 percent of students who took gap years also reported either changing their majors in college or deciding on a major that they had not previously considered as a result of their gap year.
In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Robert Clagget, a former dean of admissions, wrote that students who take constructive gap years tend to have higher GPAs than what would have been expected from their applications.
While gap years with programs such as Americorps are gaining popularity in the United States, the rate at which Americans take gap years is still far below the rates of countries such as Turkey, Norway and Denmark, where nearly half of all college students take a gap year, according to the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation.
If the point of college is to develop oneself and discover who one truly is, then shouldn’t we be placing a greater emphasis on helping young people find themselves before they even get to college?