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Gap Year - spinoff from a comment in the IB vs. AP question
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Anonymous
| One of the posters said that students who devoted themselves to IB "burned out" and as a result "had to" take a gap year after high school to recuperate, as if this were a bad thing. My question is do gap years reflect badly on admissions? I think that students can learn alot from being out in the world for a year before going in to college. I certainly would have, and I think I would have applied myself more earnestly to my studies. I think you gain alot in maturity from being out a year, and from what I understand the Europeans do this with frequency. Thoughts? |
Anonymous
|
Most kids apply to college and get accepted. Then, they can announce they're doing a gap year and keep defer their admissions. Some kids use a gap year to try to better their college choice. There are no guarantees -- but that strategy might work for someone who is doing something very interesting such as building an orphanage in Romania or something like that.
Gap years are pretty common now and even the Ivies encourage a certain number of their admits to take them. |
Anonymous
| Do you know roughly what percent of an incoming class defers for a year? On average, because I'm sure it depends on the college. |
Anonymous
| I'm sorry I don't know and I don't know whether that information is published in any of the college guides. Some schools actually encourage the "gap year" especially when the class is oversubscribed...i.e. more people accepted admissions than expected. |
Anonymous
| As a parent, I don't want to subsidize a gap year after graduating from high school. Once my kid graduates from college I'd be happy to finance a gap year. |
Anonymous
| You wouldn't necessarily have to subsidize it. Why not have your kid take a job for a year? Better do that and then be refreshed for studying at college. |
Anonymous
| I realize some kids need a gap year after so much "performance stress" all of their lives. I would just be fearful of losing momentum and then not ever going back. Some people have much more discipline about it I guess. |
Anonymous
| Actually, I think that a gap year provides needed perspective and many times create more willingness on the child's part to focus and do well in college. If you don't "subsidize" a gap year for a child that may need it, you may find that the child never finishes college at all - and you end up subsidizing a heck of a lot more than just a gap year. Further, a gap year can give the child perspective on what they "truly" want to do with their lives, as opposed to figuring it out in the first two years of college in between frat parties and lost weekends - or doing whatever their parents told them to do... |
Anonymous
I worry that a gap year might result in my child losing academic momentum. |
Anonymous
|
Interestingly, Harvard's Dean of Admissions recommends it - this article he co-wrote explains why:
http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/time_off/index.html |
Anonymous
| Great article. Thanks for sharing the link. |
Anonymous
| Princeton is also encouraging incoming students to take a gap year and has established a scholarship fund to underwrite the cost for students who can't fund it themselves. We know 2 college students who've done this in recent years, and in both cases their parents say it was the best thing their kids could have done. As the parent of a high school student, I can tell you that the threat of burnout is very real for kids who go to competitive high schools, whether public or private. A year off to work, study, travel, and/or do community service (the kids we know who did a gap year combine all of these experiences) can help refresh and re-focus kids who are just plumb tired of the high school grind. (Sad, but true.) |
Anonymous
| Is likely to vary from school to school and from year to year? I would imagine that colleges encourage entrants to take a gap year if in a given spring they find themselves with a higher-than-expected yield, i.e. more kids took up their acceptances than the college was planning for. |
Anonymous
| Losing academic momentum? I took four years off after undergrad and did so much better at grad school as a result. I am sure that this kind of thing is better for some than others. I would have gotten a lot more out of college if I'd done one. My husband is from the UK and he did one. He worked for 6 months and traveled for 6 and went to Oxford. Sounds perfect to me. |
Anonymous
|
Interesting article in the Post about gap years:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/06/AR2009110603606.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 The author is in favor of them. |