https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answ...-is-doing/

Interesting story on Malia Obama choosing Harvard but first choosing to take a year off from school before she matriculates in the fall of 2017. I personally like the idea of choosing a gap year before beginning college and wish I had that option 35 years ago when I was a very young 17-year-old heading off to college (I skipped a grade so I turned 17 in February of my senior year of high school).

My younger daughter has a mid-May birthday. I think a gap year might help kids who are younger than their classmates. My older girl has a late-December birthday so I'm not sure a gap year would be needed for her. But taking a year off to perhaps volunteer/travel abroad/get a job to help pay for college! is probably a decent option for a lot of families and kids.

I don't see where gap years help college athletics at all because that's what redshirt years are for is probably the rationale in the NCAA world. But I do wonder if there will be a sports community that evolves in the future where gap kids continue to play club level sports of some type that aren't affiliated with high school or private schools/academies?

There is already an issue of parents "redshirting" their children before kindergarten.

Had a little thing called the draft and Viet Nam that prevented many of our guys from taking a gap year. Of course when you are well heeled you can do as you please. I am sure she is going to do some construction work, or maybe back pack Europe on $6 a day and smoke a lot of hashish.

Interesting topic -- a few of us were just talking about it this morning.

Man, I hate the term "gap" -- it makes even the most admirable or necessary experience sound like a jaunt by the spoiled.

(05-01-2016 12:59 PM)ETx Owl Wrote:  Had a little thing called the draft and Viet Nam that prevented many of our guys from taking a gap year.

Historically it might be more accurate to say "enabled" rather than "prevented". For every person who stayed in school chiefly to avoid military service, there are many more (spanning many generations) for whom military service WAS the "gap" experience -- i.e., the interlude between one level of education and another. [To use a celebrity example, for every Bill Clinton in modern history there has been more than George H.W. Bush.] In many cases their military service is precisely what made college possible.

(05-01-2016 12:35 PM)Fort Bend Owl Wrote:  But taking a year off to perhaps volunteer/travel abroard/get a job to help pay for college! is probably a decent option for a lot of familes and kids.

Hear, hear! I have never known a college student (grad or undergrad) with work experience (civilian or military) who was not a better student because of that experience. But then again, I'm not sure I've known many who genuinely thought of that experience as a "gap".

(05-01-2016 12:59 PM)ETx Owl Wrote:  Had a little thing called the draft and Viet Nam that prevented many of our guys from taking a gap year. Of course when you are well heeled you can do as you please. I am sure she is going to do some construction work, or maybe back pack Europe on $6 a day and smoke a lot of hashish.

If only you could still do $6 a day in Europe.

That's more of a South/Central America or Southeast Asia thing these days. But even there I think the single dollars a day doesn't exist anymore.

(05-01-2016 12:59 PM)ETx Owl Wrote:  Had a little thing called the draft and Viet Nam that prevented many of our guys from taking a gap year. Of course when you are well heeled you can do as you please. I am sure she is going to do some construction work, or maybe back pack Europe on $6 a day and smoke a lot of hashish.

Like get multiple deferments.

But back to FBO's original comment...it would have helped a lot of us I suspect to have had a gap year.

Sorry Rice lad. Went to Europe in summer 1969 and it was $5/ day, really. I think the travel guide was even written by a Harvard student. No gap year for me. Had a high selective service number but once I got to med school I got a letter every year that I was going in when I graduated. Luckily they evacuated Saigon in 1975 and I graduated in 1976. I doubt you can get a coffee in Europe now for $5. The good old days but I think Rice football won 6 or 7 games the entire time I was there.
But went to NCAA basketball tournament and the gym was always packed, it was the cardiac kids.

(05-01-2016 04:50 PM)utahowl Wrote:  Luckily they evacuated Saigon in 1975...

Perhaps lucky for you; considerably less so for the Saigonese :)

In my completely anecdotal experience, seems like the gap year idea is becoming more popular. Can't remember who it was, but someone (colleague or client) was recently telling me that their child was planning to take a gap year.

I think it's a great idea; when I think back on the super-smart kids I knew at Rice who didn't really want to be there (and got correspondingly less out of the experience as a result), I really think they would've benefited from a year in some completely different (preferably at least slightly uncomfortable) situation. And would've come back much more focused and engaged (with a rare few discovering that college simply was _not_ right for them, and going on to do something else for a while).

I think this could be a culturally significant moment; the daughter of the sitting President doing it could serve to somewhat legitimize and normalize the idea of the gap year.

Do they freeze tuition for you while you're off on a gap year and do they freeze your and your parents' financial aid status as well? Probably not questions the rich (and soon to be super-rich) Obamas need to ask, but the only way a gap year could ever possibly catch on beyond the rarefied upper class would be if one could actually come out ahead financially by doing it.

Ironically, one thing that could really push significant numbers of otherwise college-bound middle class HS graduates into taking gap years would be raising the minimum wage to $15, making it possible to earn and save a worthwhile amount of money in a relatively short time - especially if you can continue to live at home with your parents and incur no significant expenses - and thus lessen dependence on incurring expensive student loan debt.

Naturally, though, this would also greatly enrich the labor pool for minimum-wage jobs - the supply of which would be shrinking at the same time as employers automate to reduce labor costs - and inevitably result in the displacement of the low-skilled, low-income, non-college-bound "working poor" the raise-the-minimum-wage movement is ostensibly designed to benefit.

As Milton Friedman said, the true minimum wage is always zero.

(05-02-2016 02:20 PM)illiniowl Wrote:  Do they freeze tuition for you while you're off on a gap year and do they freeze your and your parents' financial aid status as well?

Not to mention any scholarships one may have earned coming out of high school. I know some of the scholarships my kids chased the last couple of years required enrollment in school the fall after HS graduation.

It's been too long since I graduated HS to remember what that situation was like in my day. I did get a draft sequence number, but I believe my HS class was the last to do so. I still carry my Selective Service card as a reminder.

Edit: Actually the last draft call was Dec. 1972 and the authority to draft expired in June 1973, just after I graduated from HS. Looks like the last sequence numbers were issued in 1976 for those born in 1956. I got my sequence number in 1975, so I was the next to last group.

(05-02-2016 02:20 PM)illiniowl Wrote:  Do they freeze tuition for you while you're off on a gap year and do they freeze your and your parents' financial aid status as well? Probably not questions the rich (and soon to be super-rich) Obamas need to ask, but the only way a gap year could ever possibly catch on beyond the rarefied upper class would be if one could actually come out ahead financially by doing it.

Ironically, one thing that could really push significant numbers of otherwise college-bound middle class HS graduates into taking gap years would be raising the minimum wage to $15, making it possible to earn and save a worthwhile amount of money in a relatively short time - especially if you can continue to live at home with your parents and incur no significant expenses - and thus lessen dependence on incurring expensive student loan debt.

Naturally, though, this would also greatly enrich the labor pool for minimum-wage jobs - the supply of which would be shrinking at the same time as employers automate to reduce labor costs - and inevitably result in the displacement of the low-skilled, low-income, non-college-bound "working poor" the raise-the-minimum-wage movement is ostensibly designed to benefit.

As Milton Friedman said, the true minimum wage is always zero.

I dont think obama is worried about tuition

(05-02-2016 02:20 PM)illiniowl Wrote:  Do they freeze tuition for you while you're off on a gap year and do they freeze your and your parents' financial aid status as well? Probably not questions the rich (and soon to be super-rich) Obamas need to ask, but the only way a gap year could ever possibly catch on beyond the rarefied upper class would be if one could actually come out ahead financially by doing it.

Ironically, one thing that could really push significant numbers of otherwise college-bound middle class HS graduates into taking gap years would be raising the minimum wage to $15, making it possible to earn and save a worthwhile amount of money in a relatively short time - especially if you can continue to live at home with your parents and incur no significant expenses - and thus lessen dependence on incurring expensive student loan debt.

Naturally, though, this would also greatly enrich the labor pool for minimum-wage jobs - the supply of which would be shrinking at the same time as employers automate to reduce labor costs - and inevitably result in the displacement of the low-skilled, low-income, non-college-bound "working poor" the raise-the-minimum-wage movement is ostensibly designed to benefit.

As Milton Friedman said, the true minimum wage is always zero.

Not just for the super rich. I know a couple of solidly middle class families (prosecutors and public school teachers) whose children have done a gap year in Latin America and Europe respectively. IIRC, one child received a Rotary scholarship.