Our daughter is 15. We’re in the UK. She’s doing her GCSE’s. Will then go on to do her A-Levels age 16-18.
After that she wants to go to university. Uni is 3 years. I hope she’ll go straight to uni and get her degree done and dusted.
If she chooses to have a gap year between A-levels and uni then that’s her choice, she’s an adult and can make up her own mind. For me I’d rather she cracks on and uni gets her degree…but as much as I can advise her and give her my opinion ultimately it’s her choice
I took a gap year long before it was a thing, in the early eighties. I hated high school, and decided I was done. I soon found out that there was nothing out there for someone without a college degree and no sales or mechanical aptitude. I didn’t like college either, but I didn’t find it difficult and sleepwalked my way through. Same with grad school, although I didn’t dislike it quite as much. Our older son no doubt wishes he took a year off, as his freshman year was a disaster. He went back spring semester last year, and at least passed all his classes.
I went straight from high school to college and hated it - and before I got there, I was really excited about being accepted at my first-choice school. I dropped out, joined the Navy, and immediately spent a year in various training commands. :smack: But it was different because I felt like there was a real point to what I was doing.
And after a few years, I discovered that my original college goals weren’t what I really wanted. I went back for an engineering degree. The gap years made all the difference in my career path.
As a result, I see no problem with a gap year or two. We don’t necessarily know at 18 what we really want to do with our lives. I certainly didn’t. And face it, some people shouldn’t waste any of their time in college. You can be a perfectly productive member of society without a degree.
Except that if you don’t make them live on that income, the lesson won’t mean much–and it’s hard to do. Full time minimum wage jobs are hard to come by–they like to keep people under 30 hours, so that they don’t have to offer benefits. They also give you unpredictable hours, which makes having, say, two 20-hour week jobs pretty complicated. You end up in a weird income band where it’s not really enough to live out of the house, especially not legitimately–you can’t afford the deposits you’ll have to pay, you can’t afford insurance, you can’t afford a car. And even if someone pays those things, you’re going to struggling. I mean, even if you are taking home $8/hour, that’s less than a thousand a month. $500 for half a shitty apartment, another $100 for utilities . . . that’s not much left to eat on. Unless there was a real reason to think a kid needed a dose of reality, I think it’d be hard to let your kid live live like if you were living in comfort–so you’d supplement things.
On the other hand, if a kid lives at home and isn’t paying for housing, utilities, or food, that same $1000/month is an insane about of money for just covering personal expenses. You can live like a king on that.
A generation ago, this was pretty good advice. With a roommate, you could manage on minimum wage salary. But the math doesn’t work out anymore.
Sometimes you just have to realize it’s the lesser evil. If you don’t have any aptitude for the trades it can be brutal. I hated school, but college was my only path to a decent living. Our son came to the same realization. He’s having a tougher time, because he doesn’t have my ability to BS my way through assignments and has to fight the temptation to just blow them off. Fortunately his younger brother is one of those who hated high school but likes college.
I think it’s a fine idea. If you’re not ready, take that gap year. Or if you just want to get some other life experience for a year, go for it. Obviously, it depends on the individual, but if my kids, when they reach college age, explain they want to take a year off before attending college, I can’t see myself objecting.
Personally, I wanted to take a year off between sophomore and junior year in college. I was just completely psychologically and emotionally burnt out. I was a straight-A student in high school, but I had some hiccups sophomore year and just needed some time to reset myself. My parents were dead set against it, and so I finished off fall quarter junior year with ho-hum, but not disastrous grades, but when winter quarter hit, I ended up on academic probation.
I had enough. I was going to take that break, damn whatever my parents said. They were confused. Mom was crying. Dad looked deadly disappointed. It was hard to explain that I was going to finish off college, I just needed time to reset myself. For me, it worked. I returned winter quarter the following year (so took more like 2/3 of a year off) and finished off the rest of my college years with the best grades I’ve ever had there. Went from a 1.8 my academic probation quarter to a 3.7 afterwards and never under mid-3s since. And that gap (2/3) year was instrumental in getting a job abroad right out of college. And instilled in me a renewed sense of confidence. Now, YYMV, of course, but I went in with the attitude that I needed a “reset” and it was never on my mind to not finish college, no matter what others may have thought. That said, college isn’t for everyone. If someone finishes that year and decides college isn’t for them, why not trade school or something else rather than flushing money down the college toilet because that’s what people are expected to do?
So, from my perspective, taking a year off is just fine.
Not saying it doesn’t happen but I’ve not seen that.
My oldest barely graduated HS and decided she wanted to explore a career at Papa Johns. After a year of running her own store she decided she’d had enough of the business and turned her eyes toward nursing. Enrolled in a state college at 21, got a 3.8 cumulative in her distribution classes and a CNA certification, and has applied to a few nursing B.S. programs. While she’s waiting to hear back from the B.S. programs she’s getting her CNA experience out of the way with a job that starts Monday.
My youngest dropped out during her senior year of high school to become a drunk. A year after we got her wrung out and rehabilitated she decided it was time to get her GED and go to college to study humanities: studio art (like her mom), medieval literature (like me), philosophy (like her), and some sort of mathematics sorcery. Loves it and is doing well so far.
I went to college right after HS and did poorly my first two years because I lacked the maturity to hold myself accountable. I woke up at around age 20 and crushed it with a 3.8 for the last two years.
Yeah, in my college there were a number of students in my dorm that took a gap year between high school and college, and they seemed fine. They actually tended to do better academically than the rest of us, but I admit it’s not a random sample (as I didn’t meet the kids who didn’t go back to school after a gap year, of course.)
Was going to say nearly the same thing, but you beat me to it and stated it more articulately.
While I was aware going to back to school that this time it was voluntary, and largely on my dime ( student loan ) all the above came to me as quite the epiphany. I was very glad I didn’t take a year off because I think now that I’d have “lost the momentum” another poster referred to. This new found “freedom” ( which included freedom to fail ) made all the difference in the world for me. For whatever reason, I did academically much better than I did in HS.
I didn’t want to be poor like we were during a good part of my upbringing, and now I had a shot at being able to get a good paying job in a field I liked, and so, there’s no way in the world was I going to fuck that up because I was sick of school. ( which I was )
I started college 4 years after high school, which is pretty standard here. Personally, I felt I was doing it at just the right age - old enough to do it properly, young enough to enjoy it.
What in particular is he sick of and why? If he thinks of school as an endless exercise of jumping through hoops, a minimum wage job might convince him to go back to school, but he’ll hate every minute and may not finish. If he’s curious and wants to learn but is sick of the pressures and unsure what he wants to do, a gap year might be just the ticket.
You’ve expressed concern in another thread you started that a conservative kid might get harassed at college. If you’ve shared a belief that colleges are liberal bastions that conservative students have to grit their teeth and get trough by force of will to get a diploma, could that have played a role?
And one more thought: Has he visited any college campuses? It was visiting campuses and attending one session of a class that motivated me to go to college.
Might an option be going to college for a year and then taking a year off if the kid still wants to. One of the great things about college is that you get away from home, which a kid might not want to mention as a reason. I turned down a free college in commuting distance to go away and it was a great decision. So did my daughter (not free, but not expensive) and it was a good decision for her also.
One advantage is that the kid would have to get decent grades to make this work, which might be an incentive. By the time he gets done with the first year, and has made friends and done well, taking a year off might not be so appealing.
At the top level, what do they want to do? If they want to take a year off, say yes, that’s a great idea! Otherwise, they would likely feel like going to college is something they are doing because someone is making them do it, and that’s not a good motivation. At that age, they need to experience making their own life decisions. Be encouraging, emotionally supportive, and provide gentle guidance.
My question is how does one get exposure to things they might actually want to do in life by taking a “gap year”? The benefit of college is that you get to take classes in different subject matter and meet new people besides the ones you just spent 4+ years with in high school. I’m guessing no one is interested in spending their “gap year” living with five people in some crappy walk-up apartment, trying to scrape the rent together each month working as a waiter, bartender or barista.
Sometimes, the point is getting exposure to things you don’t want to do (like living with five people in some crappy walk-up apartment, trying to scrape the rent together each month working as a waiter, bartender or barista) to motivate you to do well in college.
And sometimes the point is to take some time to get un-burned out on classes and reading assignments and problem sets and research papers and tests and all that.
When I was in my late teens/early 20s, that actually would have sounded just fine (and my circumstances were even worse than that at some point in the gap year, with me living in conditions where there were eight to one in a house and we bathed maybe once a week–but that was the volunteer part of the gap year). The point was to make a mental break from school after a spectacularly shitty performance, and it worked to reset myself. Granted, everyone is different, of course, but I like the idea of a gap year overall. I wish I had taken it earlier, when I thought it was right, rather than waiting an extra 2/3 of a school year to do it.
Working for a year will probably earn the student enough money to interfere with any need based financial aid programs. Those need based programs allow a student part-time work without too much penalty, but a full-time job will put him over the earning threshold to qualify for aid. My children went to college a couple of decades ago, but from what I remember of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form that’s how it worked. If the family income is already high enough so that isn’t a factor don’t worry about it, but I’d look into it.