The decision also makes Malia’s eventual arrival on the Boston-area campus easier for parents who have guarded her privacy. Another program offered by the New School in New York City also treats students as enrolled and offers up to a full year of academic credit. “Malia will take a gap year before beginning school”, the White House said in a statement. The 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of the gap year as a recognizable phenomenon in the United Kingdom, with tour companies offering travel and volunteering opportunities to “gappers”.
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Through my experience as founder and chief executive officer of Global Citizen Year, I’ve observed – both through anecdotes and hard data – that the most powerful way to change the outcomes of college is to change the inputs.
Harvard accepted only 5.2 percent of applicants this year, making the admissions cycle the most selective year yet in its nearly four-century history.
At Princeton and North Carolina, for example, freshman-year enrollment is deferred and at least some financial help is provided, while Elon considers participants enrolled and charges its regular tuition.
“If you’re not studying math, you’re busy forgetting it”, Tillman said.
Taking a gap year is becoming an increasingly popular option for thousands of would-be college students.
Today, most of our students race, without pause, along the treadmill from high school to college.
“Oftentimes, students in high school have one particular idea of what they want to do, and that isn’t always what they should be doing”, said professor Thomas Shinick of the Adelphi University School of Business.
That was apparently the plan for Malia Obama. Gap years, as Daily Intel noted this morning, are not so common for American students as compared to their peers in, say, Europe, but they’re not nonexistent.
So much that there is a national association devoted to the gap year.
“I’m going to be sitting there with dark glasses, sobbing”, he told Ellen DeGeneres during an appearance on her talk show.
Both Malia and her 14-year-old sister, Sasha, 14, are students at Washington D.C.’s esteemed Sidwell Friends School, and have been since moving to the nation’s capitol from Chicago in 2008.
For one thing, it can be intimidating for teens to break from the customary trajectory into adulthood: high school to college to first job, with a possible stop at grad school along the way. Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson speaks to college counselor Lisa Micele about why some students take gap years, what they do what their time, and how colleges view students who decide to take that year off.
Still, despite growing acceptance of the gap year, or bridge year, by university administrators – and its ready adoption in other parts of the world – many Americans continue view it with trepidation. For those who do, students can delay their entry into college by up to two years. In about 40 years of working in higher education, he said, “I have yet to work with a student who has regretted taking a gap year”.
Congrats to Malia, and the entire Obama family. Laura R. Hosid, an expert on gap years at the Vinik Educational Placement Services in Bethesda, told The Washington Post that a gap year can’t “compensate for deficiencies in your high school record”. Will students want to attend college when they come back?
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He said there were a lot of good schools and “just because it’s not some name-brand, famous, fancy school doesn’t mean that you’re not going to get a great education there”. On average, kids take six years to complete a degree, and only 9 percent of students from low-income backgrounds will do so, according to a recent study.
