Gap Years

I know you are worried about the "bad" stuff on your record. Every applicant is. Of course, "bad" is a relative term. So how worried you should be and what you should do about it depends on what you mean by bad.

Bad Means Imperfect

For most of you, "bad" simply means that your record isn't perfect. If you are in this camp, relax. Perfection is not the standard; maturity and accomplishment are. You can't mature without confronting and overcoming setbacks, failures, embarrassments, and mistakes. All those leave a little "bad" mark on your record, but if you respond maturely, you are the better for them. Likewise, you won't accomplish much unless you reach beyond what you can do perfectly - beginner anything is not pretty and all truly gifted folks have some ugly periods of growth to live down.

Generally, you probably don't need to address any of this kind of bad at all in your application. Your overall record will overcome the little blips. Furthermore, the overanxious applicant who tries to explain/excuse every imperfect aspect does not impress admissions officers. However, there are a couple of exceptions to this general rule. First, if the blip is recent and/or happening as your application is going in - something like a steep falloff in your grades during the spring of junior year - then, you should include a supplemental essay that explains the situation. Note I said explains, not excuses. See more about that below. Second, if the blip on your record is the tip of a notable iceberg in your life from which you learned much and/or were transformed - something like you got chosen for a national competition and bombed, but went back and won two years later - then, you may have the makings of a good personal essay topic.

One cautionary note: you should read on because you need to know what you should avoid doing in college. Often applicants have been protected from doing the really bad stuff during high school because of good parents. But, then you get out on your own and have some freedom. Then, wham -- some really bad things can happen, which then means you have to confront this stuff when you go looking for your first job or try to get into graduate or professional school.

Bad Means Really Bad

For some of you, "bad" means really bad. What are examples of this kind of bad?

• Academic Suspension or Expulsion
• School Disciplinary Action
• Criminal Record

These are things that signal to an admissions officer that you are a high risk admit either because you won't be able to perform academically or because you will injure the learning community in some way. If you are in this camp, you have reason to worry. More importantly, you have reason to take action both in your life and in your application.

First, the life stuff.

Solve the underlying problem. You don't want to peak in high school. Figure out what's wrong and deal with it. Are you struggling academically because you have a substance abuse problem? Get sober. Did you get an in-school suspension because you hit another student? Violence is not acceptable in a learning community. Learn to control your temper. Do you have a criminal record because you shoplifted? You may have thought it was a harmless dare that would make you a part of a more popular crowd, but it is really something that makes you untrustworthy. Establish your independence and self-reliance so you don't succumb to negative peer pressure.

Build an "after" record. Once you have dealt with the underlying problem, you need to build enough of a record that you can persuade others that you had a problem in the past, but it has been addressed and your future will not include that problem. If your bad thing happened within the last six months, you probably will have to adjust your college plans accordingly. You may need to extend high school for a year. You may need to enroll in a community college and then look to transfer. In other words, you need to accumulate some time and a solid record between you and the bad stuff. As a general rule, you need at least a year and some obvious examples of how you have addressed the problem on your record.

Now the application stuff.

Choose something positive about you to make the "center" of your application story. You want to highlight all of your good stuff, so that the bad stuff becomes one aspect of your record, not the whole thing. For example, you should write a personal essay that focuses on how you led the basketball team to its first ever state championship, not on your criminal conviction.

Disclose the bad stuff. Don't look for ways to hide it - it always comes out. A cover-up is its own bad and now you're back to square one. So just disclose it.

Write a supplemental essay to include with all your applications that addresses the bad stuff. The first part of the essay should be a straightforward, forthright presentation of the facts. No excuse making, no "totally unfair" etc. The second part of the essay should be how you have changed your behavior since the bad thing and should describe your commitment to never doing something illegal or wrong again. The third and final part of the essay should be what you have learned from the whole experience.

Fortify your story with how you have changed with other information. For example, you could get a recommendation from the teacher who turned you in for cheating if you subsequently won that teacher's trust and became an exam proctor for him.

Schedule a personal interview with an admissions officer if possible. You should go prepared to tell the officer your story during the interview - basically it should be a oral version of your supplemental essay. A personal encounter can be very persuasive and can go a long way to convincing the admissions officer to take a chance on you.

Final Thoughts

I'll let you in on what I've learned only through life and admissions experience.

You can't escape bad. Everyone I know has "bad" in his/her history. Every friend; every colleague; every applicant. Bad grades, bad relationships, bad deeds.

But, you can overcome bad. Some of the most inspiring applications I have read come from applicants who have done just that. And I admitted those applicants. I've admitted cheaters and felons because they were so much more than that. They were people who exhibited strength and courage and turned their lives around after some really bad stuff. They were worthy.

Be someone like that - someone who overcomes the bad. If you do that, you're in.

Comments or Questions? 

Post your "bad" and get ideas for how to handle it. 

I was so excited to hear about Princeton's plans to formalize a Princeton-sponsored gap year for their students before they start college. In this case, the gap year program will be for applicants who have already been admitted to Princeton, but gap years are also a great idea for high school students who have not yet finalized their college plans.

I have almost daily conversations with parents in which I recommend a gap year for their high school students, and most of the time, those parents are resistant. Many of them aren't familiar with the concept, worry that admissions officers won't like it, and wonder if a gap year will put their children at a disadvantage.

I've written here before about gap years, but here are my two cents in summary:

Admissions officers love gap years. Freshmen who arrive on campus after a gap year have had an extra year to mature, see the world, learn about themselves, gain a better sense of what they want out of college, and recharge their batteries. Every day I see what happens when people start college before they're really ready to make the most of it -- you can spot that in their transcripts a mile away. It helps when heavy-hitters like Princeton and Harvard and Yale officially get behind the gap year concept.

To get a sense of the cool things people do during their gap years, see Harvard's admissions website. Below is an excerpt from their page called "Time Out or Burn Out for the Next Generation." Note especially the last sentence: "While no one should take a year off simply to gain admission to a particular college, time away almost never makes one a less desirable candidate or less well prepared for college."

Perhaps the best way of all to get the full benefit of a "time-off" is to postpone entrance to college for a year. For over thirty years, Harvard has recommended this option, indeed proposing it in the letter of admission. Normally a total of about fifty to seventy students defer college until the next year.

The results have been uniformly positive. Harvard's daily student newspaper, The Crimson reported (5/19/2000) that students who had taken a year off found the experience "…so valuable that they would advise all Harvard students to consider it." Harvard's overall graduation rate of 98% is among the highest in the nation, perhaps in part because so many students take time off. One student, noting that the majority of her friends will simply spend eight consecutive terms at Harvard, "wondered if they ever get the chance to catch their breath."

During her year off, the student quoted above toured South America with an ice-skating company and later took a trip to Russia. Another interviewed in the article worked with a growing e-commerce company (in which the staff grew from ten to a hundred during the year) and backpacked around Europe for six months....

Members of one recent class participated in the following activities, and more, in the interim year: drama, figure skating, health-care, archeological exploration, kibbutz life, language study, mineralogical research, missionary work, music, non-profit groups, child welfare programs, political campaigns, rebuilding schools, special needs volunteering, sports, steel drumming, storytelling, swing dance, university courses, and writing - to name some chosen at random. They took their interim year in the following locales: Belize, Brazil, China, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mongolia, Nepal, Philipines, Scandinavia, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Uruguay, United States and Zimbabwe.

Many students divide their year into several segments of work, travel, or study. Not all can afford to travel or to take part in exotic activities. A number have served in the military or other national service programs. Some remain at home, working, taking part-time courses, interning, and still finding the time to read books they have never had time to fit into their schedules or begin to write the "great American novel." Others have been able to forge closer ties with parents or grandparents from whom they may have drifted away during the hectic pace of the high-school years....

Students taking a year off prior to Harvard are doing what students from the U.K. do with their so-called "gap year." Other countries have mandatory military service for varying periods of time. Regardless of why they took the year off or what they did, students are effusive in their praise. Many speak of their year away as a "life-altering" experience or a "turning point," and most feel that its full value can never be measured and will pay dividends the rest of their lives. Many come to college with new visions of their academic plans, their extracurricular pursuits, the intangibles they hoped to gain in college, and the career possibilities they observed in their year away. Virtually all would do it again.

Nevertheless, taking time off can be a daunting prospect for students and their parents. Students often want to follow friends on safer and more familiar paths. Parents worry that their sons and daughters will be sidetracked from college, and may never enroll. Both fear that taking time off can cause students to "fall behind" or lose their study skills irrevocably. That fear is rarely justified. High school counselors, college administrators, and others who work with students taking time off can help with reassurance that the benefits far outweigh the risks.

Occasionally students are admitted to Harvard or other colleges in part because they accomplished something unusual during a year off. While no one should take a year off simply to gain admission to a particular college, time away almost never makes one a less desirable candidate or less well prepared for college.

David Brooks offers an op-ed in the New York Times today about recent policy proposals that seek to increase the percentage of Americans who graduate from college. He sees two camps among the policy wonks: “ecologists” and “engineers.” Ecologists, he argues, think about problems – and solutions – in terms of a web of human relationships. Engineers, on the other hand, think about allocating resources. When politicians hope to fix a problem by throwing more money at it, he sees a bunch of policy “engineers” who don’t grasp the underlying human realities.

First he looks at the money side of the equation: Over the past three decades, he says, the government has spent roughly $750 billion on financial aid, while “the percentage of Americans who graduate has barely budged” and the “number of Americans who drop out of college leaps from year to year.” (Incidentally, economist Richard Vedder  has argued that the abundance of cheap student loans actually causes tuition to spiral upwards.) Mark Kantrowitz of Finaid.org has since disputed Brooks’s numbers, pointing to Census Bureau data showing that the “percentage of the population 25 or older obtaining at least a bachelor's degree increased from 9.4 percent in 1965 to 27.7 percent in 2004.”

On the people side of the equation, Brooks points to studies demonstrating that only a “relatively small slice drop out because they can’t afford college. Perhaps 8 percent are driven away purely for financial reasons.” Instead, he argues,

"The reasons for dropping out are as numerous as the people who do it. Many students are academically unprepared for college work. Many suffer personal or family crises. Many are bored in the classroom and disengaged on campus. Many suffer from a strange cognitive dissonance. They have high aspirations. They know what they have to do to succeed. Yet when it comes time to, say, show up for the math test, they blow it off. And yet they still seem confident they will achieve their goals."

Brooks’s observation comports closely with what I see every day working with current and former college students who make up my admittedly non-scientific-sized sample. I do hear about financial troubles interfering with school, but they are rarely the reason that people ended up taking time off during college or dropping out. Rather, what I see over and over again is lack of motivation, of mentorship, of a realistic sense of how different their lives would be in the long run with a successful transcript than without one. I see a lot of people go off the rails when they get to college because they lack the maturity and self-discipline to succeed in the looser, unsupervised world of college; they go a bit ga-ga after escaping the confines of high school and the parental roof. Others lose sight entirely of why they’re even in college as they focus all their energy on their social lives. On the less fun side, I hear about parents getting divorced, eating disorders, substance abuse, and depression. It’s not clear to me either that more money for college tuition will fix those problems.

As a former graduate school admissions officer, I’ve heard a lot of excuses about how hard it was to adjust to college life, and would I please overlook this big chunk in someone’s transcript because of the following eight extenuating circumstances. Part of me sympathized, while the other part of me shook my head.

I would encourage high school students and their parents to adopt a practice that the Europeans, British, and Australians adopted a long time ago, with real success: the gap year. Let’s face it: most high school seniors are not ready for the freedom or rigor of college. Even the top colleges in the United States smile on a productive gap year (or more) between high school and college. Whether living on a shoe-string budget teaching English in Eastern Europe or China, or working retail to save money for college, gap year students arrive on campus with more motivation and more gratitude than the kids whose parents pushed them into college right out of high school. And when it comes time to compete for a good job after graduation or a slot at a prestigious graduate program, they’ll have to make far fewer excuses for themselves.