Poll: Does taking a year off between high school and college mean 'no college'?

In My Humble Opinion
1

We are discussing college options for next year with The Cat Who Walks Alone. The Better Half’s pick for the obvious choice is “engineering at the U of I”, but he doesn’t want to ram this down her throat, so he’s asked her to submit a list of 6 college choices, so she doesn’t end up staying home next fall just because she didn’t get around to picking a college.

I, on the other hand, feel that she shouldn’t feel pressured into selecting a college “just because” that’s what you do when you graduate from high school. I told him, “There’s no law that says a year from now she must matriculate at a college somewhere. It would be okay with me if she wanted to take a year off, or even just a semester off, work, save money, think about what she wants to do with her life, grow up a little.”

I did my college at a very small Baptist liberal arts college, and in retrospect I did a poor job of picking a college. I went there basically because the campus was very pretty–red brick buildings, white shutters, green lawns, etc. My parents were careful to give me no input at all (they were being tactful), and they were pleased that at least I’d be “safe” in the girls’ dorm.

However, when I got there, I discovered the curriculum had nothing I wanted to study, as it was set up not for women’s careers, but for getting your Ph.T., your “Putting Hubby Through”. In other words, they were training pastors and pastors’ wives.

To my parents’ generation, college was just another stage of growing up, four years of trying different things, basically puttering around to get a liberal arts degree of some kind, and then, with your post-graduate work, was when you decided what you wanted to do. Things were much cheaper then–my semester’s tuition and fees were some incredibly low price, like $900.

Nowadays, kids can’t afford to spend four years futzing around, changing your major five or six times. You pretty much need to know, going in, what you’re aiming for. So I don’t want The Cat to get railroaded into picking a college “just because” and then discover in 2 or 3 years that that wasn’t what she wanted at all. She has a cousin, our niece, who is in precisely this position. She’s a junior at a Lutheran college in Ohio, has been in Christian Ed, but now wants to go into “teaching” teaching, and her advisor just told her bluntly, “You’re not mature enough to change your major late like this, and to something like ‘real’ teaching.” He told her that before he would consider allowing her to switch, she would have to bring him letters of recommendation from, I dunno, a bunch of solid citizens, saying that basically she was SO mature enough to be a teacher. And he gave her 48 hours in which to do this, which of course was impossible, so she’s stuck doing another year of college that won’t be relevant to what she’s discovered she really wants to do with her life.

So I don’t mind if The Cat wants to take a year off. The Better Half, however, is mainly worried that she’ll spend all her time hanging out with the BF, get pregnant, get married, and never get back to “college” at all.

So, does anybody have any input on what it’s like, taking a year off in between high school and college? Is it a “given” that you lose your momentum and never do get around to going to college?

2

My dad did that, back in the 70s. He said that mainly his problem was that when he did finally go to college, a year or so after graduating from high school, his math skills were so rusty that he wound up in a remedial math class for the first couple of quarters. He got up to speed pretty quick, though.

It really all depends on the person’s motivation, and probably also what they’re doing during the year off. If it’s just goofing off, hanging around with friends, and doing nothing, well, there’s probably not going to be a strong motivation to go to college. But if they’re working at a job or volunteering or something like that, sure.

I dunno how good this advice is. I definitely know that college isn’t the right choice for everyone, so if she wants to take a year to think about it and decide first, I think that’s great.

3

I didn’t take a year off between high school and college, but I am in the process of taking at least two years off between college and grad school. My mother is also a professional college consultant, and she has discussed these kinds of issues with me many, many times.

First I would take minor issue with the following:

Kids may not be able to spend four years wasting time, but it is expected that they will switch majors, and it is even more likely that their career choices will not be heavily informed by their choice of major in the long run. This, of course, excepts individuals who pursue degrees conducive to acceptance in medical school, students studying to be engineers, etc. The fact is, most 18 year olds may think they know in what direction their careers goals lie. I sure thought I did when I was 18. These notions are usually without any experiential perspective and only inhibit flexibility.

Given the inordinate cost of higher education, people often put a great deal of pressure on their kids to pick something and stick with it in order to land a decent job afterwards. I know plenty of people who have experienced this: they are looking forward to years of bitterness and resentment. Many feel they wasted four years of college, in which all the knowledge they could have ever wanted was at their fingertips, and are stuck in jobs they can’t stand. Yet many are hesitant to switch fields, not wanting to admit to themselves and to their parents that they wasted four years of time and a king’s ransom.

This seems to be the gateway to heavy recreational drug use. :slight_smile:

To get around to answering your specific question, I think that taking time off between high school and college is an excellent, excellent idea. Although I was pretty motivated, in retrospect I wish I could have started college with a stronger work ethic and a little more maturity. I have no doubt that your daughter’s commitment to higher education is pretty strong, so a year should do little to weaken it. If nothing else, time off represents a more gradual process towards complete self-reliance and freedom, whereas going directly to college is just a bit more sudden and overwhelming.

While it may not be right for everyone, for some students it may be the best decision they and their families ever make. As always, YMMV.

MR

4

Six for me, and still made it out in four years. :wink:

And on preview I see Maeglin beat me to the points I was going to make, so, meh.

5

I guess I’m a fan of the English system (or what I know about it from reading about His Fineness, Prince Williams) (and am I in fact fourteen years older than he? Why yes I am, but so what?). Students take a year off for futzing around and then go on to university. But it is understood that you are only off for that year, so there’s no “not getting back to it.” Maybe you can make clear to your daughter that you hope she’ll go to college, but that you don’t mind if she postpones it for one year? The key being to phrase it and consider it as a “break” or a “postponement,” not as something she then should plan on not doing.

I went straight from high school to college and straight from college to law school and ended up taking a year-long break after my second year of law – no easy thing to do, but I was totally burned out on being in school. I wish, in retrospect, that I had taken a year off after high school. Certainly I didn’t have the first idea what I wanted to do or be until I was a senior in college. I think a little time away from school and a little more maturity might have helped me in that regard also. But in our family, it just wasn’t an option. I wish it had been, even if I’d only spent the year deep-frying fries at a Mickey D’s.

6

Dude, I thought you popped out of the womb holding the Twelve Tables.

:smiley:

MR

7

Having just gone through this with my own Cat Who Surfs the Internet Late at Night I need to offer my 2 cents.

First, the health insurance policies for both Mrs. Kunilou and me clearly state that they only cover our children up to age 18, or age 22 IF THEY ARE A FULL-TIME STUDENT (sorry, didn’t mean to shout.)

Once we told our cat she would have to come up with her own health insurance, and it would probably cost something like $3K a year, many of her “I can take a year off” ideas vanished. Particularly when she found out that whatever job she thought she was qualified for either was a minimum wage dead end, or expected entry level candidates to have a degree.

Second, your Cat will probably never be more prepared for college than she is immediately after high school. Areas like math and foreign language are clearly in the category of use it or lose it. Perhaps she can backpack around Europe for a year tutoring math, but otherwise those skills will get rusty quickly.

Hi Opal!

Fourth, it’s a lot harder going to college when you’re working full-time – as anyone who’s gone back for an MBA will attest. And if she does get pregnant, it’s probably a lost cause.

Finally, I have no false hopes that my princess’ major (creative writing) will lead to a gainful career. On the other hand, she loves it, she’s good at it, being able to write well always helps, and we’ve told her we’ll help her out for four years and then she’s on her own.

Havings said all that, I would agree that if your Cat really doesn’t have a clue what she wants to do, and your health insurance (and other things) aren’t a factor, and you don’t mind her taking a minimum wage job and then trying to get back into the college market, AND you aren’t worried about her academic skills getting rusty (deep breath) then she WOU|LD be better off taking some time to get her head together.

Good luck.

8

Two and a half years passed between the time I graduated from H.S. and finally enrolled somewhere as a full-time college student. After I graduated, I took the fall semester off (completely) to work. I was actually kind of tired of going to school (having had 13 years under my belt) and decided to get a job. I got laid off the following January, found a part-time job, and also enrolled in community college part-time–I started to miss school, and more importantly, realized I’d never do anything I actually wanted to do for a living until I had a degree. After an abysmal spring semester (work got in the way and I hadn’t quite grasped the concept of “dropping” classes, resulting in one A and one F for my Great Return To School), I took off the rest of the year and continued to float between crappy job and slightly-better-paying-or-better-hours-crappy job. The next spring semester, I went back and did better; better enough to realize that I could do a four year degree. So, after taking the rest of the year off after the spring again, I found a small University and enrolled there the following spring–and had my B.A. three years later! (Followed by an M.S. and–committee willing–Ph.D. soon.)

So, I needed a break to get my head screwed on straight and to get enough of the REAL world to motivate me to go to college and do well. If I’d gone to college directly, I’d have lost my momentum and really think that it would’ve taken longer for me to have finished my degree.

Plus, by delying going away to college, I didn’t get there until I was already 21, which made Going To College a lot more fun from the very start…

9

And I could quote extensively from Syme’s Roman Revolution at 3, but that still didn’t stop me from taking a roundabout route through biology, chemistry, computer science, English literature, and philosophy before coming to my senses and realizing where the real money lay. :smiley:

10

I understand what you wrote about looking back and feeling that you made an ill-informed college choice. But why not help your daughter make an informed college choice? Visit colleges, do an admissions interview, sit in on some classes, stay in the dorms. Read the “qualitative” guidebooks, like Fiske’s rather than the “Quantitative” guidebooks, like Barron’s. Staying in the dorms with students was very helpful for me in deciding what coleges fit me the best.

Once she chooses a college, and is accepted, she is free to request deferred entry for one year. At the end of that year if she a)decides she’s changed her mind about the college she previously selected or b)doesn’t want to do the college thing at all, she can scrap or modify the college plan.

However, I don’t think its a very good idea to let an 18 year old have “time off” without any specific plan as to what she will do during that time, or what will happen at the end of that time. It is only too easy to drift off into doing “whatever.”

Most colleges want things like current SATs and recommendations from teachers as part of the application packet. These things are MUCH harder to deal with when you are out of high school than when you are in it. Hence my suggestion of applying and deferring.

That said, I also don’t agree with selected a major as a freshman “because its practical.” That is a recipe for hating school and bad grades. Plus, things rarely turn out the way you expect. Students at colleges are exposed to subjects that they had never even heard of in high school. (Sociology? Multivariate calculus? Latin American studies? Genetic engineering?). My friend Matt went to W&M SO SURE he wanted a degree in public policy. Well, 6 years later he’s working on his Ph.D. in Theater History. So much for being SO SURE.

Is U of I Indiana, Iowa, or Illinois? Just wondering. The Big state schools aren’t a great fit for a lot of undergrads. Too much focus on research, not enough on teaching (cough Michigan cough).

11

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. In fact, in retrospect, I wish I had taken a year off between high school and college. Although I was more than prepared academically, I was not mature enough or emotionally prepared enough to handle the responsibility of college. As a result, I ended up flunking out after two years. I then took three years off, got married, worked, and finally returned and took another 3 years to finish.

People vary enough in their preparedness for college that there’s really no hard and fast rule, AFAIC.

12

People need to know a major going in? Can’t spend 5 or 6 years?

What planet are you on? Go to any graduation ceremony today, and you’ll see people of all ages bouncing up to the stage for sheepskins. And the range is from 2-1/2 to 7 or more years to a first degree.

13

I took two years off between high school and college-- I had actually been accepted to the college I ended up going to anyway, but had really only applied because I thought I was supposed to. I was in the middle of an “I don’t need to go to college, I’m going to be a ROCK STAR” phase. Clearly, I was out of my mind.

That little fantasy faded quickly enough, and after two years I was so bored and frustrated that I went back to school, realizing that the things I wanted weren’t going to happen if I didn’t get my degree. I also worked for a year before starting grad school, though I did end up switching programs and boy was that expensive…

Anyway, I’m glad I waited for college-- I got a lot more out of my classes than a number of my average-aged classmates (there were also a couple of women in my class who were returning to school after 20 or more years away-- they were great to share classes with). Many (not all, I want to stress that) of the younger ones were there because college, to their families, was what you do after high school, end of discussion. These were often the kids who were disruptive in class, gave the profs crap, and got stuck on academic probation because studying was way down on the list under that week’s parties.

But the thing I want to stress is, it’s not an age thing, it’s a maturity thing. If you’ve made the choice, all on your own, to go to college, it stands to reason that you’ll care more about it and put more effort into it. If you don’t really give a damn and you’re just going because everyone else is, you’re wasting a bunch of money, IMO.

14

TA here. I’d be delighted if more of my students had taken some time off before college, as long as they spent it living on their own. As it is, most of them don’t know how to manage time or money without their parents standing over them, haven’t really learned how to get along with people from different backgrounds, and still think of education as a chore rather than a privilege. I think a year or two out of school puts a lot of these things in perspective. For instance, one discovers that there is a difference between writing a five-page paper and hard labor.

Of course, some people do end up discovering they prefer hard labor, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s cheaper, and arguably better, to skip college altogether than to try college and find it’s not what you wanted.

15

I was definitely NOT encouraged to take any time off. Went straight into college after high school. Dropped straight out of college after two months, over parents’ objections.

Two years later, they talked me into trying college again, and again the timing was theirs and not mine. This time I was more interested in getting an education in my chosen area, but after I got there I found that they were not set up to teach me what I wanted (“needed”) to know, and my attention went elsewhere eventually leading to my withdrawal from college.

In 1985, 8 years after I graduated from high school, I chose on my own to enter college, picked out a school based on factors indicating that the faculty shared my interests in certain key areas relevant to my major; set up my own financial aid, got admitted, and had a great time as well as a good academic performance and went on to grad school.

Don’t know if you will find this reassuring or not.

16

Thinking about it, it’s like I spent the first two years out of high school getting drunk and doing drugs undergraduate-style. The main difference being, since I wasn’t taking any classes, I wasn’t flunking any classes (and wasting any money)!

Once I’d gotten the binging out of my system and had been able to gauge more accurately what/how much I was capable of consuming and still being able to function…

then I was ready for college!

(As a parent myself, admittedly not something a parent wants to hear…)

17

I took a year off before I went…

What I wish I had done: For the first year, take a few classes part time at a junior college and get some of the mundane stuff out of the way, stuff that will transfer later. Then go to school full time at a real school

18

I went to college right after high school, mainly because “that’s what you do”. Both my parents went to college and have graduate degrees, it was just assumed that that’s what I’d do after high school. Sure, I knew what I wanted to do (archaeology, so I got an anthropology degree with a concentration in public archaeology), but I wasn’t ready. I spent most of the first year adjusting to the fact that no one was watching what I did, when I did it, or if I even went to class. I wish I had taken a year off, worked full time, and then gone. It would’ve made the transition easier, I think.

I can understand the fear that she won’t go to college though. I had to take a year off between my sophomore and junior year, and my biggest fear was that I wasn’t going to finish. But I did. And if I can, anyone can.

19

I took a ‘year off before university’, thirteen years ago. I have never gone back.

20

Ok, here’s my own non-traditional collegiate path:

Straight from H.S. to big state University which is allegedly challenging but also with a strong partying reputation. CLEPped a lot of freshman level stuff and started into liberal arts degree curriculum with little thought of how what I was studying would be used eventually. Got into typical teenager v parents arguments over what I was studying the following year, broke up with my old high school sweetheart and ended up not going back to school. I then worked a string of some of the nastiest, most boring and some frankly dangerous jobs, most for little to no money, eventually made and saved some money and decided to go back to school at Big State U. Then I financial and logistical considerations conspired to make this almost impossible. Finally, about three years after leaving I went back to school at a Big City state U.

Now the first time round most of my tuition was paid for by scholarships, my parents paid for room and basic board, all extra costs were paid left over from scholarship money. This was not so fun at a party school, and often the choice was to party or eat. The second go 'round it was nigh on impossible to find scholarships as I was no longer a fresh, bright HS grad with ridiculously high SATs, but just some guy working dead end jobs and trying to get back to school. Parents were no longer financing anything.

I decided to major in Computer Engineering the second time around (this was 1984) since that seemed like a good way to get out of the crummy jobs. I had worked for a while as a waiter and half the cooks were ex-liberal arts majors with degrees. I was motivated to study since it was my money. There was some but not much financial aid, mostly in the form of student loans. This covered tuition and books, but I had to work at least part time to cover all the other costs of living. This was a big part of the decision to go to a public school in a big city.

I did party a little, not very much, and felt much more mature and able to handle classes. I put in a lot of extra effort because I wanted to learn, the first time I was just getting by, even though my grades were better the first time around because the coursework was easier for me. I ended up changing majors a bit because I wasn’t prepared to do the hard core physics and engineering work because of the layoff from Math. I could have still done it but it would have taken an extra half year or more, and I didn’t have the patience. I was also able to find a good co-op job so that upon graduation I had plenty of real world experience. At this point it was clear that a good education with the right mix was better than rushing through as quickly as I could.

In summary, I would advocate this if you think she can handle it. Some people will flourish this way, some need the structure of school. It took me longer than I first thought to get back to school, and I almost self destructed in that time frame. If she does this I would make sure that she used the time to seriously explore what she wants to do with her life and not just futz around. Most of us could spend our whole life futzing around if someone was there to pay the bills, and you could get into a situation with your daughter that you could ultimately regret.

Finally make sure that college is the right thing for her. There are some careers that don’t require this that are very valid options for someone to make a living. As much as guidance counselors point that way its not for everyone. And if she is academically gifted it may be difficult to get those scholarships later on, if that is a big part of the decision.

[sub]Hope this helps, sorry to ramble on so[/sub]