It’s Time To Reinvent The Gap Year

In the age of COVID-19, it’s time to completely reinvent the gap year. With global travel at a standstill, campuses contemplating closures through the fall and academic year ’20-’21, and with a clarion call for improved work-readiness of college students, there are compelling reasons to create an inspiring new vision for what a “year on” might look like. We need to obliterate the stigma that a gap year is sometimes seen as a “year off.” For many students, it’s the right first step toward maximizing their college experience and exploring a fulfilling career trajectory.

Gap years have traditionally meant a year of travel. And when travel gradually resumes there will continue to be students who seek travel opportunities for their gap year. But a whole new market of parents and students is emerging quickly amidst the current disruption: those looking for critical preparation to ensure they make the most of their college investment and more thoughtfully explore various job and career options. The signs have been pointing in this direction for a long time; the COVID disruption has dramatically accelerated both the need and demand. Recent surveys have shown that nearly one out of five high school seniors have changed their plans to enroll in college this coming year. Among that population, 35% are considering a gap year. There are plenty of reasons why this may be a longer-term, positive trend beyond being simply a short-term reaction.     

The majority of U.S. college graduates end up with regrets about their education decisions, including 40% with a bachelor’s degree who would go back and select a different major if they could do it all over again. This brings new meaning to the term “major regrets.” With the current ticket prices for bachelor’s degrees it’s disheartening to see how many graduates in hindsight would want a re-do. What if we could give more of them that hindsight beforehand? Today’s generation of 18-24-year-olds are the least working generation in U.S. history. And the impact of this shows in painful ways. With little to no work experience, how do we ever expect students to have a sense of what they do and don’t like, what they’re good at or not, and to have a sense of the various career opportunities out there?

Colleges and universities invariably suffer from this generational lack of work experience too. As I’ve written many times before, very few stakeholders (except college provosts) believe college graduates are well prepared for success in the workplace – including trustees of colleges and universities who are the most skeptical of all. The factors that lead students to success in the workplace include having a job or internship where they can apply what they are learning in the classroom and working on long-term projects that take a semester or more to complete. The problem is these things are happening for less than one third of U.S. college graduates. What if students could have these experiences both before they get to college as well as during college? The evidence suggests we’d dramatically improve the odds that students make the most of college and achieve the greatest return on their investment.

The opportunity to reinvent the gap year is both immediate and critical. We have the chance to reimagine it as a thoughtful year of preparation that allows students to explore various fields of study and different job and career options. We can also design it as a work-integrated learning year to allow students to have many hands-on (remote, online and virtual for now – but eventually in-person too) opportunities to do project-based learning and work projects designed by employers and supported by coaching and academically-linked reflection. It could also be envisioned as a new year of service, as NYU business school professor Scott Galloway has suggested with his brilliant and provocative idea about a ‘Coronavirus Corps’ comprised of college students. This is one area where the COVID-19 disruption will force incredibly exciting innovation, and students, families, higher ed institutions and employers will all be better off because of it.