President Obama’s 17-year-old daughter, Malia Obama, recently announced that she will be attending Harvard University for her undergraduate studies beginning in the Fall of 2017. “The gap year is an enticing option and helps students realize that predictability and orthodoxy can be quite limiting to their growth”, she said.
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Many colleges require students to provide documentation or even a separate application pertaining to what they’re going to do during their gap year. But many students also reported doing volunteer or political campaign work, taking classes, travelling or doing outdoor adventures in different regions of the US.
Universities including Princeton, Tufts and the University |of North Carolina have formal gap-year programs, which give students the option of participating in a structured year of service overseas or in the United States, depending on the school.
Q: OK, but what do students say?
“I felt like it was necessary to go straight into school”, said Hofstra University student Sean Bates. But those benefits don’t come automatically – how you structure a gap year matters a lot.
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. For Malia, taking a gap year means taking time to reconnect with her family and herself outside of life in the White House – a year to breathe and adjust to life as a somewhat regular American citizen. The group reports that anecdotally, interest has been growing via participation in gap year fairs that promote the programs.
Higher education experts tout the off-year as a way to travel, engage in a long-term special project or otherwise use the time in a constructive and meaningful way and Mrs. Obama has said Malia wants to be a filmmaker. “There are many reasons why a student may request a gap year”, says Andrea Felder, Director of Freshman and International Admissions at the University of Florida.
But Knight stressed that not taking a gap year shouldn’t be seen as a disadvantage. I took a gap year between college and graduate school, and another before starting a doctoral program. While this may not be nationally representative, it does allude to the fact that certain types of experiential gap years are afforded to students from higher-income families. A study by a former admissions officer at Middlebury College in Vermont and Harvard College found that students who took a gap year had higher GPAs than predicted based on their academic profiles at the time of admission.
“She’s one of my best friends”, Obama said.
And there’s more bad news, which I’ve written about before: Only 11% of employers say that college graduates are ready for the workforce. 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”.
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Malia’s much-speculated-upon decision, announced in a news release after months of official silence from the White House about her college search process, will make her the latest in a long line of presidential children to attend the elite university in Cambridge, Mass.
