prospects for a gap year sector in the united states

8/6/2019 Prospects for a Gap Year Sector in the United States

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Prospects for a Gap Year Sector in the United States

Mickey MuldoonSean Muldoon

June 2010



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INTRODUCTION

What does it mean for a high school graduate to be ready to succeed in college? In

education policy circles, “college-ready” is more or less synonymous with “academically

prepared.” Analysts and standards-writers will dutifully explain that students who are

ready to succeed have a strong command of spoken and written English, have studied

mathematics through trigonometry, and have a firm understanding of the fundamentals of

the hard sciences and American and world history. In high school, they will have written

complex essays, done some research, and are capable of independent reasoning.

“College-ready” students begin college with Calculus and 100-level courses; the others

place into non-credit-bearing, remedial-level courses.

This definition of college-readiness, though not inaccurate, is also not complete.

Academic preparation is, no doubt, a key factor – if not the key factor – in college

success and graduation. But it is not the only factor. Large numbers of students with

perfectly rigorous high school academics eventually drop out of college. More still

graduate eventually – but only after changing majors two or three times – requiring extra

semesters and extra tuition payments to get across the finish line. And even then, getting

through college isn’t always the same as succeeding in college: graduates in majors like

communications and psychology often face a rude awakening that their degrees mean

little in a job market that values hard skills and knowledge. Only in hindsight do they

realize they should have planned ahead better for graduation.

Why do even academically-prepared students still drop out or struggle to find a

path to a decent career? The authors claim that there is, in essence, a large but generally-

overlooked set of attitudes, knowledge and habits that successful college students have

and unsuccessful ones don't. Part of this skill set is related to academics but not quite the



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same as academic knowledge; it includes a basic sense of what the disciplines and majors

mean, and to what kind of careers and skills they connect. Another part of the skill set is

what could prosaically be described as “commonsense good habits” – including the

ability to keep track of multiple projects and responsibilities, to be financially

responsible, and to keep a dependable calendar. A third element of the skill set has to do

with self-knowledge: the ability to gauge one's own strengths and interests and how they

may lead to some careers or majors, and to think sensibly about one's life goals and

aspirations and how college is a means to those ends. In the best cases, college students

who lose track of responsibilities or finances or become overwhelmed with a sense of

“not knowing what I want to do in life” don't make the most of their experience. In the

worst cases, they fade out or drop out.

Extra-academic skills and knowledge are rarely, if ever, mentioned in discussions

of “college-readiness,” and perhaps for good reason. Discovering one's goals in life and

learning how to be responsible are the kinds of things we expect students to do at home,

at work, or in the community. Moreover, talk of “life skills” evokes sore memories of an

era in American education when “home economics” and “life adjustment courses”

replaced core academics and became a major factor Americans' declining competency in

math and science.

But the fact remains that these “life skills” and “life knowledge” are crucially

important for success in college, and when masses of students fail to learn them, it's not

just the students and their families who struggle. It's also the taxpayers who subsidize

them and the high-skill economy that lose out. Moreover, those who would be skeptical

about school teaching “life skills” should also note that schools already attempt to take

on this role: guidance departments, career centers, and study skill workshops in high

schools and colleges exist precisely for this purpose.



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The problem with the “guidance system” is that it works reasonably well for

short-term decisions – choosing a college, fulfilling requirements, getting access to

employer recruiters – but largely avoids the fundamental issue of helping students

actually figure out what they want in college and a career. High-school counselors only

speak in general terms about their students' careers, focusing instead on the immediate

task of helping them gain admission to a post-secondary institution. “Career counselors”

at college also focus on the short-term issue of helping soon-to-be graduates land

employment. “Freshman counselors” at college focus more on the emotional issues of

adapting to life away from home, and administrative issues like navigating requirements

and financial aid. But in that crucial period between the end of high school and the end of

a student's first year of college, when she determines her major and sets forward on a path

through college to a career, there is too infrequently an adult around to give her the

information and advice she needs to think deep and think big about these crucial

decisions.

Building upon these observations, this paper suggests a new kind of guidance

arrangement, in a new kind of setting. We call it a “gap year program” (GYP). For many

students who are in one way or another undecided about what they want out of college or

don't know how to get it, a GYP would be an low-cost and low-risk environment in

which to explore their interests, learn about their own strengths and weaknesses, reinforce

or learn effective habits for living independently, and interact with thoughtful and

dedicated advisers.

GYPs do already exist, but mostly in Western Europe, Israel, and Australia. The

model for GYPs sketched in this paper builds upon the spirit of existent GYPs, but with

several important tweaks. Most importantly, this paper suggests a sustainable financial

model that would allow GYPs to keep tuition low or free, and therefore open to those



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students from modest means who are most at risk of dropping out or drifting through

college. Whereas most current GYPs involve an extended volunteer, civil service, or

travel experience, the GYP model described in this paper involves academic exploration

and explicit instruction in various “life skills” and essential knowledge for college

success.

It is the authors' hope that this paper will, first and foremost, begin to open the

conversation on “college-readiness” to include some of the elusive skills and knowledge

described above, while not minimizing the primary factor of academic competence. For

those who agree, this paper will make a strong case that GYPs could be a more powerful

and effective alternative to the current patchwork system of college and career guidance.

We are excited by the potential of new GYPs and we hope to convey this enthusiasm

while also frankly acknowledging potential pitfalls and challenges to making them work

well.



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I. Making it through college: The Reality

America's institutions of higher education may still be the envy of the world, but

they are also showing signs of dysfunction and misalignment. In the broadest terms, they

are producing too few degrees, and becoming too costly, with few signals that quality of

instruction is improving. This is, of course, not entirely their own fault; colleges will

point out that large numbers of students arrive academically, socially, or financially

unprepared for the challenge. Part I describes some of the most salient and troublesome

trends in college access and completion, as an introduction to the problems that GYPs

could be designed to combat.

K EY T RENDS

Only 28% of American high school freshmen go on to receive a degree from a 4-

year college, and only 56% of the students who enroll in 4-year college ultimately

graduate.i

Despite a tripling in inflation-adjusted K-12 education spendingii

and a 400%

rise in college costs since the 1970s, completion rates have stagnated.iii

Additionally, if

current demographic trends continue, the college completion rate is estimated to decline

5% by 2025.iv

Compounding the dropout problem, research shows that people who

complete “some college” have lifetime income trends far more similar to high school

graduates than to college graduates.

v

Completing a few years of college could actually domore financial harm than good.

Even as completion rates at public universities have remained roughly the same

over the past thirty years, the number of semesters that students take to graduate has been



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steadily increasing.vi

As students stick around in college longer, parents and taxpayers

pay more than necessary for those extra semesters, and the economy is deprived of much-

needed high-skill workers.

Another alarming symptom of the imperfection in higher education is that

students under-enroll in those courses of study most likely to land them employment,

such as computer science and engineering. top 10 lucrative majors Among doctorate-

holders employed in the United States in science, engineering, and mathematics in 2000,

almost half of them were foreign-born.vii

On the other hand, concentrations lacking in

rigor disproportionately attract undergraduates. According to the Princeton Review,

Psychology, Communications, and English – all of which have reputations for weak

academics – are three of the ten most popular college majors in the United States.viii

While a central goal of a liberal arts education is to develop well-rounded and

intellectually curious citizens, and majors such as philosophy and English are actually a

good fit for some, there remains an unavoidable mismatch between what graduates know

and the reality of the job market. As Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence

F. Katz write, “College is no longer the automatic ticket to success. Rather, degrees in

particular fields and advanced training in certain areas are exceedingly important.”ix

Interestingly, even as college students under-enroll in the most potentially

lucrative majors, they view their post-secondary education through an increasingly

utilitarian lens. In a 2009 survey, for example, 78% of college freshman said that it was

essential or very important to be “very well-off financially” as a result of their education,

and only 48% said the same about “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.” The

numbers were nearly inverted in 1971, when 37% and 73% of respondents emphasized



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financial and philosophical goals, respectively.x

As the economy has taken a turn for the

worse, students have only become more demanding; in one high-profile 2009 case, an

alumnus of Monroe College in New York actually sued her alma mater for $72,000

because she was unable to find work three months after graduation!

Putting these trends together, students and parents are increasingly concerned

about the financial rewards a of college degree, yet they do not obtain the degrees most

likely to lead to high-paying jobs, and moreover, they spend more than necessary on

increasingly-expensive tuition by taking extra semesters to graduate – if at all. These

trends amount to a glaring “college preparedness disparity” between the skills,

knowledge, and aspirations that students have when they enter college, and what theyactually need in order to graduate on time and ready for a career .

W EAK F OUNDATIONS

The “college preparedness disparity” has at least four sources: guidance, career

connections, organization, and finances.

Guidance • Choosing a collegiate course of study is one of the most

consequential decisions that young men and women will ever make. Yet for too many

students, it is rushed and tentative. At the high school level, guidance counselors tend to

consider college admissions as the end of their work; they infrequently provide advice

about what students should study or do once they go to college. In a survey of people

who had attended at least some college, 60% said that high school counselors were “fair or poor” at helping them think about career paths; 48% said that they felt like “just

another face in the crowd.”xi



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At home, parents are another important source of advice. But they, too, have

limitations. In a quickly-changing job market with a growing range of post-secondary

options, parents are less likely to have practical advice based on their own experiences.

And for first-generation college students, parents are simply unable to provide

meaningful advice on courses of study. Even successful graduates are sometimes

beholden to a strand of conventional wisdom more applicable in a bygone era of

economic growth and security: that it doesn't really matter what you study as long as you

“learn how to think,” that just getting a degree is what matters, that you can always

change your major later. The last piece has become a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy:

students at some colleges change their major, on average, three times before graduating.

xii

In the end, even with loving and supportive parents, large numbers of students arrive on

campus every year with little more than a vague notion of what they'd actually like to

study.

College counselors are supposed to provide additional perspective. They are

responsible for directing new students toward an appropriate course of study, ensuring

that they stay on track to fulfill degree requirements, and advising them on their options

for internships, student jobs, and ultimately, careers. But this is a tall order, and

counselors rarely handle it. Education expert Chester Finn writes:

I've been staggered to see how difficult it is for [first-

generation] students to make their way successfully through

that system, knowing what to take, what is prerequisite for

what, what a major is, how to mesh one's requirements for

the major with one's "distribution" requirements, how to



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sequence things--and how to study, prepare for exams,

budget time, deal with crises, etc etc etc. In our experience

with ... two individuals, the universities involved (one

public, one private, one east, one west) do a mediocre job of

counseling/advising and a DREADFUL job of outreach to

those who might need counseling but who might not even

know quite what questions to ask. I came to realize how

much of this sort of thing we did for our own kids back in

the day, and how daunting it can be for individuals without

such family support to make their way successfully through

the system. I've come to believe that this is a nontrivial

contributor to the college dropout problem.xiii

In many cases, these various guidance-related duties are distributed across the system:

freshmen get “freshman counselors,” then graduate-student “academic advisors” within

their chosen discipline, then optional “career counselors” in a separate building. The

counselors themselves are often graduate students with no particular expertise in advising

itself; compounding their lack of expertise or interest, they are regularly overburdened.

At private universities, the ratio of career service staff to students is 1:1000; at public

universities the number is fewer than 1 in 2000.xiv

Unfortunately, this is a recipe for bad

advice and confusion.

Confusion often leads to more serious emotional difficulties. Students frequently

return to campus for their sophomore year depressed to find that the novelty of college

has worn off. They start to take specialized courses in their chosen major, and as soon as



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material gets hard and dry, they second-guess their decision – and worry about the

direction of their career. Without the familiar supports of freshman year, they easily feel

lost inside the university.

This problem affects students even at colleges that eventually have very little

dropout problems: Yale University officially acknowledged the problem in 1995 and

coordinated programs and extra supports to counteract the “sophomore slump.”xv

And in

his book, Excellence without a Soul, former Harvard College dean Harry Lewis wrote:

Too many students, perhaps after a year or two using college

as a treadmill to nowhere, wake up in crisis, not knowingwhy they have worked so hard – or realizing, perhaps, that

they do not want the future for which their parents pushed

them so hard and sacrificed so much.

Lewis continued to lament the inaccessibility of professors:

It is the fortunate student, in such an existential dilemma,

who can find guidance from a professor …. Faculty

members often think that anyone admitted to such a

prestigious university ought to be grateful to be studying

what the professors are offering.xvi



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Perhaps students at less prestigious universities avoid this particular type of problem.

Nonetheless, accessibility of college professors remains a serious problem across the

board.

Career connections • The link between college and a career is not always

direct; while chemical engineering majors might be clearly prepared to work in chemical

engineering, far less so for psychology, political science, or even mathematics majors.

For better or worse, this is a central feature of the liberal arts curriculum. But this does

not mean that English majors, for example have the luxury to defer thinking about their

careers until after graduation. On the contrary, it means that they have to work harder and

sooner in college at clearing a path through the untidy terrain of the humanities and into

some job or graduate degree program. For nearly everyone, figuring out how one's degree

translates into a career or even an immediate post-collegiate job is hard and takes a lot of

work; far to many students have barely begun to make the connection by commencement

day.

Internships are traditionally the way that college students have explored new

professions, industries, or organizations. They are crucial for building experience and

developing a student's resume, and more importantly, to give students the chance to see

the “real world” with their own eyes. And of course, they often lead to post-college jobs.

But they can also be expensive; the internships in profitable industries like banking and

engineering pay living wages, but otherwise students are expected to work for free.

This way that internships function today is less than optimal in three ways: (1)

first-generation and low-income college students, the ones who struggle the hardest to

make it through college and into a profession, are the least likely to be able to afford

unpaid internships; (2) Because internships are often viewed as bonus free labor, the

organizations that offer them have less incentive to nurture interns or employ them



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efficiently, though some employers do. It is therefore generally difficult for applicants to

determine beforehand whether an internship will be meaningful or menial; (3) Students

exploring careers have at most three college summers during which to do internships, but

they may actually need to experiment with a dozen industries or organizations before

finding a suitable fit. To make ends meet, college students work, but typically in the

services labor sector (restaurants and shops) line do not know where to go from there.

Without meaningful work experience, many simply move back home after college –in the

economy circa 2009, 10% of young people under age 35 have moved back in since

leaving home.xvii

The lack of good internship and career exploration opportunities affects evenhighly successful college students. In many cases, students at elite college deal with it

this “real world disconnect” by just defaulting to the well-traveled paths toward

professional degrees. Despite their varied skills and legendary extracurricular

accomplishments, Ivy League graduates overwhelmingly take predictable paths after

college into law, medicine, and business management, sometimes with a stint at a

financial or consulting firm and/or Teach for America before graduate school. At the

peak of the real estate bubble in 2007, 58% of male Harvard seniors entering the job

market went into finance.xviii

As challenging as Wall Street work may be, this kind of

employment trend puts a disturbing percentage of America's “best and brightest” in a

single industry, when talent is sorely needed in the public sector and elsewhere.

Organization • Stimulant-fueled “all-nighters,” rampant procrastination, and a

universal sense of dread in the face of multi-phase research projects have become the

norm at colleges, and again, even at the elite universities. They are evidence of another

key trend: today's college students struggle with the basics of efficient study and



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organization. In a recent survey of college dropouts, for example, 73% said that if we

“make sure students learn good study habits in high school so they’re prepared for

college work,” it will “help a lot” for future students at risk of dropping out.xix

Of course,

students are expected to develop study and organizational skills over the course of high

school and college; the problem is that nobody is actually responsible for teaching or

evaluating them. In economic terms, study and organizational skills have become an

“externality” to the system. Like the hidden costs of pollution, no single actor pays the

price for students' failure to develop these skills. The failure thus becomes systemic,

even at a great cost to the productivity and well-being of society. One further

consequence is that very little empirical data currently exists to evaluate the effectivenessof different organizational techniques and habits. How to address and reverse this by

establishing partnerships with researchers is considered in the next section.

(This is not to deny the fact that high schools and college do offer study strategy

courses and have support centers. Unfortunately, the students most in need of help are

also those least likely to recognize that they need it. Furthermore, the quality of these

courses is unpredictable; they are viewed as add-ons, with low priority in strategic and

budgetary decisions.)

Despite the lack of a rigorous systematic research, there is plenty of anecdotal

evidence that effective study habits and techniques already exist and can be taught to

nearly anyone. Medical students, for example, have developed highly effective

techniques for internalizing staggering amounts of information, with the help of flash

cards and other visual aids. In recent years, flash card techniques have gone digital –

allowing students to keep micro-level data on what the know and don't know in real-time.

Similarly, both technology is giving new life and efficiency to old-fashioned techniques



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for speed-reading, visualizing, outlining, and consolidating information. Even writing,

which is an idiosyncratic process by nature, requires a few core organizational skills: for

starters, finding the right setting in which to write, developing a method for gathering and

incorporating research, outlining, and developing the discipline to write multiple drafts.xx

All of those habits can be taught and tweaked.

Organizational skills are also a huge new challenge for high school graduates as

they make the transition to college life. But it does not have to be that way [reword]:

students should be prepared to make the best use of their flexible time to explore and

develop new interests, and to have fun without stress and guilt. Once again, efficiency-

enhancing techniques already exist.. David Allen's “Getting Things Done” (GTD)method, for example, involves a serious of behaviors and systems that branch from the

goal of the empty inbox and clear mind. GTD has achieved a mythic following among

information workers; British journalist David Hammersley wrote in The Guardian , “For

me, as with the hundreds of thousands around the world who press the book into their

friends' hands with fire in their eyes, Allen's ideas are nothing short of life-changing.”xxi

This author has confirmed that GTD can be learned and taught with relatively little

difficulty.

Finances • The growing cost of college is perhaps the single largest contributor

to dropout and drift. College tuition continues to rise faster than inflation, yet average

wages remain stagnant, and for too many families, a layoff or financial emergency can

instantly put college out of reach. The impact of finances on college success is clear:

event after controlling for academic preparation (GPA and standardized test scores),

students of lower socioeconomic status are still more likely to drop out and take longer to

graduate.xxii



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The fundamental problems in the four domain just outlined contribute

significantly to the difficulties faced by today's college students, but they still receive far

too little attention in the “college-readiness” debate. Once again, while academics are the

basic and incontrovertible cornerstone of college-readiness, these four factors are, as Finn

termed them, “non-trivial” contributors to the problem. The good news is that they are all

much easier to teach or manage than core academics; this paper proposes that a single-

year GYP would be sufficient to remedy them. Before describing some of the key

features of GYPs, though, we turn to the more pressing question: why supplant, rather

than supplement, the current college and career guidance system that is already in place?



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II.The Case For A New Sector

Let us be clear that the thousands of professional guidance counselors, academic

advisers, career counselors, and social workers across the country play a valuable role for

students in the process of making important decisions about where and what to study. At

their best, advisers can offer invaluable advice and support, especially in the cases when

students are considering a career path unfamiliar to their parents. Examples abound of

support staff who have gone far above and beyond their duties to help talented students

make it to college and succeed once they get there. These individuals deserve the highest

honor and admiration.

With all respect to these extraordinary individuals, it is the our opinion that the

system of college and career guidance is in key respects out of date and out of alignment.

Some functions are essential and could not be replaced by a GYP, such as helping

students choose a post-secondary option, and once in college, navigating the institution-

specific requirements. But other functions – choosing what one wants to study, helping

students think about their long-term goals, and assessing students' strengths and

weaknesses – would be done better by new organizations (i.e. GYPs) designed

specifically with these functions in mind. Below are four reasons why.

High school is too early and college is too late • Even at those institutions

where incoming students a forced declare a major, the first year of college is supposed to

be an exploratory period where students sample the disciplines and choose (or switch

into) their favorite. In practice, though, the process is haphazard. Students have to

balance a huge number of factors when choosing their courses: for starters, lotteries in

over-enrolled classes, and balancing exploration vs. electives vs. general education vs.

foreign language requirements. Moreover, freshmen usually choose a major based on



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their experiences in lecture-style introductory-level courses, but those courses hardly

represent the range of skills actually needed in the practice of the discipline. Students

considering a major in engineering, for example, will rarely have a chance to make

anything in their introductory math and physics courses. With the additional factor of

adjusting to the social and emotional challenges of collegiate life, freshman year is just

not the ideal time to rationally and systematically explore one's career options.

Guidance departments are outdated and under-appreciated • The high-

school level guidance system was conceived in the first half of the twentieth century, as

educational access in America exploded and there was a sudden need to sort out students

into one of a variety of career paths. At the time, educational administrators took on

pseudo-scientific stature, supported by the nascent field of psychology. Master's degrees

in areas such as “Higher Education & Student Affairs Administration,” became signals of

the new era of the professionalization of career advice and other support services. And

the new generation of counselors determined their advice “scientifically” by looking at

IQ scores:

Children who scored below 70 could expect to perform

unskilled labor; those from 70 to 80 were likely to become

semiskilled labor; those from 80 to 100 were likely to be

skilled or ordinary clerical labor; those from 100 to 115

would qualify for semiprofessional pursuits; while scores

above 115 would ‘permit one to enter the professional or the

larger fields of business.’xxiii



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This vision of guidance has clearly outlived its usefulness and is overdue for a

new structural foundation.

In the era of “test-based accountability,” schools feel enormous pressure to meet

quantitative academic targets. While forcing schools to focus on the fundamental work of

teaching academics may be a good thing, this reality certainly means that college and

career counseling is going to continue to be strained. In the current state budget climate,

budgets are being stretched thin and extra support staff, like counselors, are sometimes

the first to be cut.

A GYP sector could be a greenfield • In his 2010 book, Education Unbound ,

defines greenfield as “an area where there are unobstructed, wide-open opportunities to

invent or build … Greenfield schooling presumes that the greatest challenge for

improving teaching and learning is the creaky, rule-bound system in which they

unfold.”xxiv

A new GYP sector would be the kind of open space upon which new and

innovative organizations can start from scratch and blossom. There would be minimal

political interference, few educational restrictions or regulations to cope with, no

problems with accreditation, and no “establishment” against which to do battle. In the

lingo of Clayton Christensen, a theorist of innovation in business who has also forayed

into education, the GYP market would be a classic area of “non-consumption,” a brand

new space with no status quo and no limiting rules or traditions.xxv

New arrangements and program types, piloted and refined at new GYPs would

have ripple effects forward and backward into high school and college. For example,

“blended learning,” with a mix of online and in-person instruction, has enormous

promise, but few schools have the capacity to implement it nor the will to experiment

with it in the classroom. GYPs seeking to find new ways for students explore their own



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intellectual interests, on the other hand, could accelerate the evolution of blended learning

models considerably. As Christensen has described, innovations within the non-

consumption space at first have little effect on the mainstream (in this case, competitor

would be the current guidance system). But in time, “The new companies introduce what

for them are sustaining innovations … And at some point, users can take tasks that

formerly could be done only in the [mainstream].” In lay terms, this describes a ripple

effect by which innovations in a new space gradually spill over in the mainstream. In the

case of GYPs, it means that the kinds of experimentation with “blended learning”

programs described above would eventually spill over into mainstream high schools and

colleges, producing pedagogical breakthroughs that benefit the entire system.

The concept is already being tested • GYPs are common in Western Europe,

England, Israel, and Australia. Most commonly, young graduates arrange to work and

save for a period of a few months, then plan a backpacking trip together. Common

destinations are Latin America and Southeast Asia, where there are beaches and cheap

currencies, though traveling throughout Europe and Australia remain popular.

Australians seem particularly eager to explore beyond their corner of the world;

their country boasts 19 reciprocal “working holiday” agreements with European and

Asian countries and Canada, allowing Australians to work legally abroad, provided the

purpose is not to directly advance one's career.xxvi

Young people more interested in

working with established travel and volunteer programs can find a host of resources

through GapYear.com. The Australian Defense Force also offers a GYP for recent high

school graduates,xxvii

in which they are paid a salary but have no obligation to continue

beyond the year. England has similar agreements throughout the European Union.



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In Israel, gap year travel is commonly a bookend to young men's 3-year

compulsory military service. Certain resort towns in India and Southeast Asia, such as

Ladakh, in the Himalayas, are famously flooded with young Israeli men in the

summertime. Israelis also frequently travel to the United States to staff Jewish summer

camps or remain in Israel to study Hebrew at Yeshiva and Midrasha schools.

In Denmark, Gap Year travel become so popular that the Danish Labor Market

Commission recently offered cash incentives for students to complete their undergraduate

studies more quickly, claiming that reducing time-to-degree by one semester would

improve public finances by 2.5 billion kroner ($475 million) annually.xxviii

Danish and

Dutch students often use the experience to practice English and other foreign languageselsewhere in Europe.

In the Netherlands, a new program called Liberal Arts Year at the college

Academia Vitae, offers a year-long course intended to help students discover their

interests and acquire a broad base of knowledge before starting college.xxix

The GYP

sector proposed in this paper will bear more resemblance to Liberal Arts Year than to the

international travel and volunteer experiences that are more common across the world.

In the United States, American students rarely take a year off between high school

and college. Programs based in Europe do advertise to Americans, but the costs alone

generally run near or above $10,000 for a three-month experience.xxx

Global Citizen

Year, an interesting American GYP “incubated” at the Harvard Business School, sends

American volunteers to rural Senegalese and Guatemalan villages for nine months, and

costs $26,000 – though financial aid is available.

There is at least one well-known GYP that is both affordable and domestic: City

Year. It pays students to work in high-need urban social services for a year, and serves



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roughly 1,400 American volunteers annually. It receives funding through the federal

AmeriCorps program, private foundations, individual donors, corporations, and in-kind

donations. Its focus is explicitly on citizenship and community service, though it also

emphasizes the benefits of personal growth and college and career success.

The ballooning cost of college tuition is enough to detract most would-be

“Gappers” and their parents from such a luxury. And even if they may be able to work to

pay for cheap travel to destinations like South America, American high school graduates

are simply unlikely to speak foreign languages, hold passports, or desire this kind of

experience.



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III. Core Elements of a Gap Year Program

We have thus far argued that there today's college students face serious

difficulties getting across the college finish line, and that these difficulties include a

collection of factors beyond core academics that would be better taught in the context of

a new and entrepreneurial GYP sector. In Part III, we sketch possible content and

curriculum of GYPs, outline key revenue streams to make GYPs broadly affordable, and

address the crucial question of quality control.

BUILDING E SSENTIAL R ELATIONSHIPS , K NOWLEDGE , AND SKILLS

Expert guidance • What would a smarter guidance arrangement look like? Two

features would be paramount: students would be required to master crucial information

and they would engage with thoughtful adults in a way that would encourage mentorship

and long-term relationships.

Crucial information, in this case, includes graduation requirements and other

important college-specific rules and guidelines, all of which is available online now;

statistics and trends about college majors and careers that are most and least secure, and

most and least risky; clear information about the complications and pitfalls of changing

majors mid-course; employment and career trends for graduates of specific colleges;

cutting-edge psychological and behavioral economic research on the predicable follies of

human decision-making; and nuanced psychological evaluations to help students assess

and understand their own cognitive, social, and emotional strengths and weaknesses.

Secondly, GYPs could encourage mentorship. Using pre-existing social networks,

online networks, and surveys, GYPs organizers could identify and organize adults who

possess “moral authority,” who are both respected and successful and who are interested



24

in connecting with students at this critical juncture in their lives. GYP participants might

meet one a week, for example, which would greatly increase the chance of them forming

a genuine and lasting connection.

Third, GYPs could delve into the personal but enormously important “big picture”

topics that inevitably factor into major life decisions. They include questions such as

“What kind of life do I want to lead?” “Are some types of jobs more morally valuable

than others?” “How much money do I want to make?” and “How do I see myself fitting

into the world.” Schools and colleges – and even philosophy courses – hesitate to ask

such large and sensitive questions directly, perhaps because they don't fit directly into a

single academic discipline or because they lead to sensitive moral and religious terrain. A

non-governmental GYP sector, on the other hand, would not have to the kind of political

pushback that schools suffer when they tread into sensitive topics such as evolution and

cloning, not to mention morality.

Exploring interests • GYPs could have give students much broader exposure to

the academic disciplines and to the careers to which they connect. Students could have

the chance to do a dozen site visits, job-shadows, or week-long internships at

organizations of interest. Program organizers could pre-select the organizations, looking

for those that are well-run, that do exciting work, and that are most likely to inspire

visitors, like high-performing urban charter schools, innovative research labs, and new

entrepreneurial ventures. GYPs could establish partnerships with new organization such

as Career Explorations, which already matches students with high-quality internships in

major American cities. Such an approach – as with teaching study skills and arranging

meetings likely to result in mentorships – would bring deliberateness and focus to the

usually-happenstance process of learning about real world workplaces.



25

On the academic side, GYPs could introduce more efficient and effective ways

for students to discover their interests. As mentioned above, the process could include

some online courses, where students could view lectures from leading scholars and

complete a few units of introductory-level material in a broad range of disciplines. On-

site GYP staff could direct students to popular literature and current commentary on

current issues such as climate change, sustainable energy, and financial industry reform,

using current literature to springboard into the applicable academic areas. Students who

find that their interests overlap could be encouraged to read and discuss the same material

semi-independently. This style of academic exploration would create a bridge between

prescriptive curriculum in high school and boundless freedom in college.

Organization and study skills • Gap Year programs could research, implement,

teach, and measure study skills and personal productivity skills, building off current

techniques such as flash cards and “Getting Things Done.” Doing so might entail

partnerships with academic researchers in areas of psychology and education with an

interest in technology-assisted learning. As Hess wrote in Education Unbound ,

“Fortunately, there is a whole population constantly seeking significant new programs

and ventures to evaluate and study: graduate students and professors .… In return for

exclusive access, entrepreneurs can get both the independent data and empirical analysis

they need.”xxxi

Financial literacy • Finally, GYPs could help financially vulnerable students

enormously by rigorously teaching financial literacy. College is an enormous and

complex investment, and students – especially those whose parents did not attend college

– must be prepared to understand all of its moving financial parts. Federal student aid

forms are notoriously difficult to navigate and complete. College aid programs can be



26

byzantine and often require obscure insider information. And while there are countless

scholarships available to every shape, color, and size of college student, only those lucky

enough to have proactive parents or guidance counselors actually know these

scholarships exist. A recent survey illustrated how the aid system can work backwards:

only 3 in 10 college dropouts received any form of financial aid, whereas 6 of 10

successful graduates did.xxxii

A course on “financial aid literacy,” therefore, would give

GYP students the opportunity to invest significant time applying for scholarships and

loans throughout their gap year, rather than during their last semester of high school,

when the college application process and many other factors already drown out the

importance of financial planning.

A SUSTAINABLE F INANCIAL M ODEL

As illustrated in Part II, the cost of current GYP options is prohibitively high for

most new college entrants. The business model of such programs is simple: for a single

tuition fee, participants get an all-inclusive travel or volunteer experience. But there are

other creative ideas out there to make the program affordable. Below are five potential

revenue streams for a new GYPs sector, all of which would reduce or eliminate the

financial burden on families.

Part-time work • In the United States, the Cristo Rey Network of Jesuit high

schools has become a successful proof of concept for the idea of mandatory part-time

work as a feasible tuition offset. The Cristo Rey high schools, targeted to low-incomeHispanic families, require all students to work one full day per week in a white-collar

professional environment. To do this, the school arranges partnerships with local

corporations and non-profits and trains students in basic office procedures and etiquette;



27

businesses pay 20-30 dollars an hour directly to the schools in return for the work.

Despite the challenges of placing low-income students with no experience in these

settings, the programs have been a success, and the network continues to grow across the

country. And under the arrangement, families pay among the lowest tuition rates of any

private schools in the country – just $1,500 a year for the 60% of students on financial

aid, and $2,650 a year for the others.xxxiii

The part-time work arrangement is a win-win-

win: it offsets tuition costs, it is an unbeatable learning experience for students, it is a

useful service for employers, and it gives employers a sense of social responsibility.

GYPs could learn from this model. Especially as GYP students seek to explore

areas of study and employment, having a positive experience in a real-life business would be enormously beneficial. As with site visits and mini-internships, GYPs would need to

specialize in screening for responsible and high-energy work environments.

GYPs might even run their own businesses. This would surely be more

complicated and require more expertise, but could have large payoffs: students could be

more involved in the business, have more flexibility to make their own hours, and learn

valuable entrepreneurial skills. One promising example is the Harvard Student Agencies,

the largest and oldest student business in America. It operates the popular Let's Go! travel

book series and numerous on-campus services. More importantly, is a renowned training

ground for future business leaders.

As an example, a GYP could run a personal computer consulting, repair, and

customizing business. Personal computers and home networks are omnipresent, and the

growing complexity of networks, peripherals, and smartphones can be overwhelming for

ordinary users. As a result, they are not getting the most out of their technology, even

when new products should be leading to great enhancements in personal productivity.



28

Many times, users get stuck with virus-riddled computers and, not knowing how to back

up or clean up their home systems, pay much more than necessary to buy new equipment

instead of have it repaired. At the same time, personal technology consultants are

expensive, as they have extensive skills more suited to consulting with businesses with

more complex needs. Instead, a GYP's in-house business could squarely target the

“ordinary consumer” market, charging rates closer to $30 an hour for these services, far

less than the $60-100/hour market value. For students, getting more experience

specifically in a tech-related field would encourage them to pursue collegiate courses of

study in computer science or engineering, both of which are in demand in the US, with

fewer graduates than job openings.

Philanthropy • Numerous major foundations are committed to the goal of

improved college access and completion, including the Lumina Foundation, Spencer

Foundation, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. GYPs would align squarely with

this grant-making priority, and if well-designed and well-lead, there is at least a good

chance they would provide seed funding for these new ventures. It should be noted that

philanthropy is not a completely reliable funding source; the goal of GYPs would be to

take philanthropic dollars as “venture capital” to cover initial overhead and planning

costs. In time, GYPs would want to rely on funding that does not depend on foundation

endowments and the vicissitudes of grant cycles and priorities.

School districts and colleges as customers • Two recent developments make it

more likely that high schools and college might eventually contribute to GYPs.. First,

early-graduation high school programs could funnel student money to GYPs that would

ordinarily pay for students’ last year or two in high school. For example, a promising new

initiative in eight states will allow their students to graduate after 10th

grade upon passing



29

a “board” test in the core subjects.xxxiv

Under the under the current arrangement, students

who pass the test may take college-level AP or IB classes or enroll, free of charge, in

local community colleges. Why not also allow them to enroll in GYPs? If GYPs can

prove that their programs improve college readiness, reduce drift and dropout, and

improve career alignment, they would be more helpful and more valuable than the

average community college.

Similarly, early-graduation college programs could make GYPs more affordable

in comparison. Already, a handful of colleges across the country offer 3-year degree

programs. For students in these programs, the taxpayer money that would ordinary go to

subsidize a fourth (or fifth or sixth) year of college could instead be directed toward aGYP.

Colleges have financial incentives to see to have their students graduate: the more

semesters that students stay on campus, the more tuition they earn. And high schools are

also somewhat accountable for their graduation rates, in the context of statewide and

national accountability schemes. In states like Florida, high schools are actually linked to

the future college graduation rates of their students.

It is therefore possible that in the not-so-distant future, both high schools and

colleges will have direct financial incentives to see to it that their students graduate on

time. If GYPs could demonstrably prove to increase graduation rates of their participants,

then high schools or colleges might subcontract their students to GYPs for a year or

subsidize them in other ways.

Federal government • The Obama administration has also made college access

and completion a key priority, and has recently appropriated billions of dollars in new

programs to achieve the goal of the highest worldwide college completion rate by 2020.



30

At the same time, the federal Department of Education under Secretary Arne Duncan is

intent on re-tooling much of its core work, moving away from compliance and formula-

based grant distribution and towards competitive grants that provide seed money for

innovation.xxxv

GYPs could represent the kind of innovative, new organizations that the

new Department now seeks to support and incubate.

Infusing programs with public money, of course, adds layers of difficulty and

complication. Part of the promise of GYPs is they would occupy a “greenfield” of new

space in education, away from the layers of legal and political complication that make

innovation so hard within the public education system. Furthermore, one problem of

guaranteed government funding and a lower barrier to entry in the sector, is thatunqualified or unprepared operators could easily open doors. As states like Arizona,

Texas, and Ohio have learned with charter schools, reducing the barrier to entry

inevitably involves a trade-off with quality. Once bad schools have opened, they are hard

to close, and they have every incentive to twist the arms of their customers and their

bosses in order to stay in business.

E NSURING Q UALITY

Of course, being fully private (non-profit or for-profit) would no more guarantee

the quality of a GYP sector than being private has guaranteed the quality of the American

health care sector. Private niche educational markets in the United States, such as English

as a Second Language, private tutoring, and test preparation, are notoriously opaque

about their results and their quality. Therefore, some form of accountability – in the best

case scenario, voluntary and transparent – and quality control must be part of a GYP

sector. GYPs should track their graduates and their employment histories after college; if



31

successful, they could advertise how much better their graduates perform in college and

in job hunts than their peers.

Teach for America is a hopeful precedent: it is both a non-profit organization and,

to a large extent, its own sector (it has no similar competitors). Even though it is a

“monopoly,” quality, good leadership, and continuous improvement have been central to

the organization since the start. This explains why it has always had a positive reputation,

even when the actual performance of its teachers was less impressive than it is today.

GYPs would be much more difficult to design, and in many ways, more

complicated than TFA. But the lesson from TFA is clear: the best guarantee of success

would be mission-driven, intensely dedicated leadership from the very start. If the barrier

to entry in the Gap Year sector is too low, the entire sector could become tainted. On the

other hand, as TFA has shown, a “benevolent monopoly” would not be a danger to the

consumer in the same way it is in the for-profit sector.



32

CONCLUSION

Education reformers tend to consider “K-12 Education” and “Higher Education”

as two different categories. This distinction, as sensible and generally useful as it may be,

has left the crucial issue of the transition from high school to college in a policy

purgatory, with far too little research and analysis on the kinds of experiences and

policies that ensure successful high school students also become successful college

students. This paper has described some of the problems students face in the transition,

and how Gap Year Program sector in the United States would create a more effective

bridge between the two very different universes of learning.

College remains the great gatekeeper to opportunity in the United States; for the

millions who struggle or give in college, it is a costly and disappointing investment. Our

hope is that future Gap Year Programs will not just maximize this investment, but

provide broad returns to society with more confident, satisfied, and productive citizens.



33

REFERENCES

i

William Bowen, Matthew Chingos & Michael McPherson, Crossing, the Finish Line: Completing

College at America’s Public Universities . 2009: Princeton University Press, 4, 20.

ii

US Department of Education, Digest of Education Statistics 2008 , 59.

iii

With Their Whole Lives Ahead of Them: Myths and Realities About Why So Many Students Fail to Finish College . 2009: Public Agenda, 9.

iv

Bowen, Chingos, & McPherson.

v

Ibid.

vi

Ibid, 26.

vii

Ibid, 7.

viii

“Top 10 College Majors,” Princeton Review, Online at http://www.princetonreview.com/college/top-ten-majors.aspx.

ix

Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology. The RaceBetween Education and Technology. Belknap Press: 2009, 353.

x

“Making College Relevant.” New York Times , December 29, 2009.

xi

“Bad Advice, No Advice,” Inside Higher Ed, March 3, 2010. Online athttp://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/03/counselors.

xii

“Choosing a Major,” UAA Advising. Online athttp://www.washington.edu/uaa/gateway/advising/gettingstarted/basics_majors.php.

xiii

Chester E. Finn, Jr., in “How Can College Completion Rates Be Improved?” National Journal

Education Expert Blog, September 14, 2009. Online athttp://education.nationaljournal.com/2009/09/how-can-college-completion-rat.php#1358809.

xiv

Re-Visioning Career Services for a New Economy . Eduventures: 2009. Online athttps://www1.vtrenz.net/imarkownerfiles/ownerassets/884/Re-Visioning Career Services for a NewEconomy.pdf.

xv

“Sophomore slump sneaks up on students,” Yale Daily News, March 25, 2004.



34

xvi

Harry R. Lewis, Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education . 2006: PublicAffairs, 12-13.

xvii

“Economy is Forcing Young Adults Back Home in Big Numbers, Survey Finds,” New York Times , November 24, 2009.

xviii“’07 Men Make More,” Harvard Crimson , June 6, 2007. Graphic at

http://www.thecrimson.com/image/2007/6/6/unnamed-photo-8988/

xix

Their Whole Lives Ahead of Them , 20

xx

http://bigthink.com/stevenpinker , see “Steven Pinker on writing about science,” and his explanation of his writing style

xxi

“Meet the man who can bring order to your universe,” The Guardian Online , September 29, 2005.

xxii

Bowen, Chingos, & McPherson, 45.

xxiii

Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. 2000: Simon & Schuster, 139.

xxiv

Frederick Hess, Education Unbound: The Promise and Practice of Greenfield Schooling. 2010:ASCD, 1-3.

xxv

Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, & Curtis W. Johnson, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. 2010: McGraw-Hill.

xxvi

“Working Holiday,” Australian Government, Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Online athttp://www.immi.gov.au/visitors/working-holiday/.

xxvii

“Gap Year,” Australian Defence Force, online at http://www.defencejobs.gov.au/education/gapyear/.

xxviii

“Committee proposes cash incentives for speedy students,” Jyllands-Posten [Denmark], May 5, 2009.Online at http://jp.dk/uknews/article1684210.ece.

xxix

“Academic semester Liberal Arts Academia Vitae,” InfoHub. Online athttp://www.infohub.com/study_abroad_ppl/40.html.

xxx

For example, see the Mind the Gap International, one of many such programs.https://www.mapthegapinternational.com/programs.section/pages/prog_intro.html.

xxxi

Hess, 136.



xxxii

Their Whole Lives Ahead of Them , 11.

xxxiii

David Whitman, Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism, 2nd Ed.2009: Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 125.

xxxiv

“High Schools to Offer Plan to Graduate 2 Years Early,” New York Times , February 17, 2010.

xxxv

See point 6 in “Obama’s Blueprint for ESEA Reauthorization,” Quick & the Ed, March 15, 2010,online at http://www.quickanded.com/2010/03/obamas-blueprint-for-esea-reauthorization.html.

prospects for a gap year sector in the united states

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