How Taking a Gap Year Could Shape Your Life

The economic principle I’m exploring is scarcity My research question to help me study the economic principle is; How a Gap year can change students perspective and attitude

The article published in The New York Times titled "How Taking a Gap Year Could Shape Your Life"  demonstrates this economic principle because it actually shows real life examples of students who did take a gap year and what they’ve become from it.

 Many students are beginning to discuss taking a gap year and that could be thanks to Malia Obama. Taking time off between high school and college, like Malia is doing before she attends Harvard, has ‘plenty of appeal’ for high school graduates who don’t know what they want out of college or seek to work, travel or volunteer on the sort of schedule that an academic calendar does not allow. Parents however, become worried sick at the the mentioning of a gap year, while no parent wants to pay the outrageous tuition fees for students who don’t know what they are doing, a common fear and misconception is that taking a gap year actually slows down a students momentum. Twenty-five years ago, Ron Lieber(article author) and friend Colin Hall tried to dispel those concerns by finding and interviewing as many students who took gap years as they could.In the end they profiled 33 of them in a book called “Taking Time Off,” which was published 20 years ago. The two authors tracked down everyone from the book to see what exactly had happened to them. Lieber went into this experience asking himself and the 33 profiled; ‘Was their gap year ultimately incidental to their lives, or did it help them grow into the person they were meant to become? And for those who now had children, how would they react if their children wanted to take a gap year?’ It’s very hard to find data when researching a gap year, and that is partially thanks to the fact that federal data on college delay and completion don’t measure all the reasons people started college late. The article states that; ‘While some people make a deliberate choice to delay college to serve in the military or work or travel, others meander for a few years before deciding to try college after all.’ A number of researchers have shown a connection between a deliberate choice to take some time off and getting better grades upon return to the classroom.

The article went into further detail about a few of those being profiled. Those included all came from completely different backgrounds, did completely different things during their gap year, and are doing completely different things in their lives now. Those involved went onto explore fields such as environmental science, education, political campaigning, and much more. Many parents worry that if their children take a gap year, it will make them appear undisciplined and insubordinate to employers, which may have more to do with the term than how that year was spent. As many would put it like Abigail Falik, “It suggests a hole”. Abigail Falik prefers the term bridge year, because it helps to convey the deliberate connection between one stage of life and the next.

Many people who take a gap year get better jobs after college than people who don’t. Put yourself into an employer’s shoes, you’re hiring entry-level employees, wouldn’t you rather hire the risk-taking 23-year-olds who found their way in the world for a while than the 22-year-olds who done mostly nothing besides going to school? The article really helped to express the pro side of taking a gap year through showing real people and how it changed their lives. For example, Susie Steele took time off from the University of Vermont to teach disabled people to ski. She eventually landed a full-time job at the Keystone Science School in Keystone, Colo. Currently, Steele is a middle-school biology teacher in Louisville, Colo., and when asked she said she figures her odds would have been quite long without the gap year.

Through so many real life examples of real everyday people it's very apparent that the effects of one’s gap year lie solely in what they make of that gap year and the experiences that help them to grow and mature without experiences nothing but schooling for the majority of their adolescent and young adult life.