The following piece was published in The Washington Post
last week. I would like to thank Adrienne
Wichard-Edds for interviewing me about this topic and for letting me post it here.
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Want to help kids
succeed in college? Let them take a gap year.
Want independent, well-adjusted kids who succeed in college,
career and beyond? Parke
Muth, a veteran college admissions consultant who spent nearly three
decades in the University of Virginia’s admissions office, makes the argument
that the best investment you can make in your kid’s college education might be
to delay that
education.
Muth, who has worked with thousands of highly competitive high
school students from around the globe, often encourages kids to take a gap
year—a year off between high school and college—to travel, work, learn a new
language or pursue independent study.
This concept has its roots in Europe (particularly England) but
has been steadily growing in popularity in the U.S.; and while there’s not a
lot of hard data on how many students choose to take a gap year annually,
organizations such as the American
Gap Association cite
private studies and student feedback to report on the rising trend—as well as
on the myriad benefits—of taking a structured year off before entering the
high-stakes world of higher education.
But isn’t taking a gap year just a form of procrastination? A
slacker’s path out of studying? Muth waves off my perception as outdated,
explaining that it’s often quite the opposite. (He does say, however, that
announcing that you’ll be taking a gap year can sometimes come off as being
overly privileged, “like you can do anything you want and get your parents to
pay for it.” So he suggests that kids leave any mention of it off their college
applications and then request to defer their enrollment once they’ve been
accepted.) Muth highlights instead how a gap year can address the problem
plaguing so many colleges today where kids are unable to manage themselves, and
parents are unable to let them.
“Parents have been chauffeurs and secretaries for their kids all
their lives, so kids tend to have a rough adjustment period when they head off
to college,” he says. “But taking a gap year is the antidote to helicopter
parenting.”
It’s an investment in the whole person,” Muth says, one that
allows kids to develop the maturity, independence and self-reliance necessary
to make the most of a college education. He speaks to the significant growth
opportunities that a gap year can provide as well as the common freshman
pitfalls it can help students sidestep. It can also give students the
opportunity to take a step back to focus on their goals, leading to a stronger
sense of direction once they’re back in the classroom.
Well, when you put it like that! Isn’t this exactly what we’re striving to give our
kids—a sense of their place in the world and how to appreciate it and make the
most of it?
“A gap year experience can also expose kids to the realities of
the world that awaits them on the other side of college,” Muth continues,
turning them into young adults who are more inclined to take their education
seriously rather than as a “prepaid, four-year playland.” Plus, it gives kids a
break from the intensive work—and parenting—that goes into completing high
school and getting into college, making it less likely that kids will bottom
out during their first year away from home.
This is starting to sound all too uncomfortably familiar to me:
While I eventually graduated with a GPA respectable enough to earn me a spot on
the Dean’s List, I cringe remembering how flagrantly I allowed myself to tank
academically my first year in college, missing classes because I had stayed up
until 6 a.m. (not a typo!) or rationalizing my absence because the professor
would never know if I wasn’t one of the faces in the 300-seat lecture hall. I
won’t even begin to go into the generalized stupidity I engaged in once I
finally moved out from underneath my parents’ watchful eyes. I spent the next
three years scrambling to make up for that.
This is a high cost not only academically for students like me,
but also financially for parents who are shelling out an average of $23,410 for
public schools or $46,272 for private schools each year, according to the College Board. The cost of
supporting a student who’s taking a gap year is often significantly less, and
when those students enter college the following year (and 90 percent do, according to a study
conducted by Karl Haigler, author ofThe Gap-Year Advantage: Helping Your Child Benefit from
Time Off Before or During College) they
often do so “much hungrier to succeed and get off the treadmill,” as Muth puts
it.
Luckily for Izzy Siemon-Carome, a rising senior at Virginia
Tech, she’ll never share my creeping sense of regret when she looks back on her
own first year in school. “When I got to college, I was calmer and didn’t go
through that adjustment period that my classmates did. I was excited to be
there,” says Siemon-Carome, who took a gap year after graduating from
Arlington’s H-B Woodlawn in 2011. The year gave her “a chance to breathe, to
reflect on what I really wanted to do.” Namely, to start an outdoor education
school, a decision inspired by the 78 days she spent back-country hiking and
camping with the National
Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) in Mexico during her gap year.
(She spent the balance of her year traveling South America with a program called Where There
Be Dragons. “It took me out of my comfort zone, which is what I was
looking for.”
Siemon-Carome describes feeling burned out after 12 years in a
classroom, but her parents agreed that if she applied and got accepted to
college during her senior year of high school, she could defer her enrollment.
“Knowing I was already accepted made it easier for me to enjoy my gap year,”
she says.
Muth agrees this is a smart plan, pointing out that it’s more
difficult to get the college-application momentum going again once you’ve been
out of school for a year. This is also what he counseled his own daughter,
Grace, to do when she was graduating from high school in 2011: After being
accepted to U.Va.’s elite Echols Scholars program, Grace deferred her
enrollment and spent a year volunteering and traveling in
Europe, Africa and India.
As for the experience itself, Muth says that not only has it
helped Grace get the most out of college, it’s also the “single most impactful
growth experience” she’s had. “The ability to navigate foreign countries on her
own, without parents or teachers to tell her what to do, was a skill she’d been
building toward for years,” says Muth, but the true test of her grit and
self-reliance came as she attempted to embark on the final leg of her gap year
in India. “Grace was 18 years old, traveling in Africa by herself,” Muth
recounts. “She went to board a plane that would take her to volunteer at Mother
Teresa’s in India, and they wouldn’t let her on the plane because they said her
inoculations weren’t up to date. So there she was, stranded in the middle of
Africa with no one to take care of her or tell her what to do. She had to
figure it out all on her own. That’s a tremendous skill to have,” says the
proud dad.
This all sounds like a magical learning experience, how a little
loosening up of the apron strings can bring your child all the important life
skills that you’ve been wishing for them. But when I try to visualize this for
my own children—who are about to graduate from 4th and 6th grades and who still
occasionally return from school without their lunchboxes—it’s nearly impossible
for me to fast-forward my parenting to the point where I could conceive of
sending either one of them off to a different continent by themselves. Don’t
get me wrong: I’d love to raise kids who don’t ditch classes, who possess both
the confidence and clear internal compass that points them decidedly in the
right direction, but I can’t mentally bridge the gap between now, where they
still need to be reminded to fold their laundry, and the scenario where they
successfully figure out how to get themselves vaccinated in Africa.
“Try sending them to sleepaway camp,” Muth advises when I voice
this concern, acknowledging that there are small ways we can begin to empower
our kids well before taking a gap year is even a possibility. “Send them off to
live in a cabin with other people, hike out in the woods and learn how to make
things work on their own. Sleepaway camp is where they form bonds, figure
things out and find other like-minded souls. Parents think that if they send
their kids to camp at Harvard, it’s going to look good on their transcript, but
it’s not. Sometimes it’s better just to have a truly transformative
experience.”
So that’s where I stand, at the beginning of summer, Muth’s
advice ringing in my ears as I try not to helicopter-parent my two boys into
helplessness. I’ve spent the past year allowing them to fail gently in
order to learn to rely on themselves, and this summer I’m giving both of them
the freedom to try sleepaway camp—my younger one for the first time, my older
one at a camp that includes things like white water rafting and backcountry
camping, activities completely outside my comfort zone.
But while I’m obsessively reminding them to check for ticks,
I’ll remind myself that these are the small costs of building stronger, more
resilient, more self-directed and independent citizens of the world. Maybe it’s
time to recalibrate my mama-bear instincts so that all the protecting I think
I’m doing right now doesn’t undo their ability to protect themselves down the
road.
Adrienne Wichard-Edds is a freelance writer who’s still catching
up on 11 years of sleep deprivation. Follow her on Twitter at @WichardEdds.
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After this piece appeared I have had
a number of people reach out and comment on it. For the most part people have
been supportive. There have been a number who contributed their won stories of
doing a gap year and all of them have said how transformative it was.
One aspect of a gap year that I have
observed in the people who choose to do
this is that they not only get a wider
perspective of the world, they also learn to appreciate the place they come
from as well. The time away from home allows them to get some critical distance
and in doing so most end up becoming more appreciative of family, friends and
country. I mention this as in a few hours the fireworks celebrating the birth of the US will begin to light up the sky. The patriotism that comes with a gap
your is not one of blind allegiance; instead, it comes with an understanding
that many of the freedoms and opportunities that here in the US are not yet in
place for many. At the same time, some return with things that they have
learned that they wish to see incorporated in the US. I would also count people
who want to institute positive change as Patriots too.
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