Prospects for a Gap Year Sector in the United States Mickey Muldoon Sean Muldoon June 2010

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 isnt 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 generallyoverlooked 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 2

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.

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

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.

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.

KEY TRENDS Only 28% of American high school freshmen go on to receive a degree from a 4year college, and only 56% of the students who enroll in 4-year college ultimately graduate. Despite a tripling in inflation-adjusted K-12 education spending and a 400% rise in college costs since the 1970s, completion rates have stagnated. Additionally, if current demographic trends continue, the college completion rate is estimated to decline 5% by 2025. 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. Completing a few years of college could actually do more 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
v iv iii i ii

steadily increasing. As students stick around in college longer, parents and taxpayers pay more than necessary for those extra semesters, and the economy is deprived of muchneeded 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 doctorateholders employed in the United States in science, engineering, and mathematics in 2000, almost half of them were foreign-born. 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. 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. 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
ix viii vii

vi

financial and philosophical goals, respectively. 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 they actually need in order to graduate on time and ready for a career.

WEAK FOUNDATIONS 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

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. 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:
xii

I've been staggered to see how difficult it is for [firstgeneration] 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

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. 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
xiv

Unfortunately, this is a recipe for bad

10

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. And in his book, Excellence without a Soul, former Harvard College dean Harry Lewis wrote:
xv

Too many students, perhaps after a year or two using college as a treadmill to nowhere, wake up in crisis, not knowing why 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

11

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 12

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 even highly 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

13

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 theyre 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 effectiveness of 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

14

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. 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, efficiencyenhancing 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. 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 xxi xx

15

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 singleyear 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?

16

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 institutionspecific 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 17

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 highschool 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

18

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

19

intellectual interests, on the other hand, could accelerate the evolution of blended learning models considerably. As Christensen has described, innovations within the nonconsumption 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.

20

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 languages elsewhere 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

21

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.

22

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 ESSENTIAL RELATIONSHIPS, KNOWLEDGE, 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 23

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.

24

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. Onsite 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

25

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 FINANCIAL MODEL 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-income Hispanic 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;

26

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.

27

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 10 grade upon passing
th

28

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 a GYP. 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.

29

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 formulabased 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 that unqualified 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. ENSURING QUALITY 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

30

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.

31

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.

32

 REFERENCES

William Bowen, Matthew Chingos & Michael McPherson, Crossing, the Finish Line: Completing College at Americas 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/topten-majors.aspx.

ix

Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology. The Race Between 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 at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/03/counselors.
xii

Choosing a Major, UAA Advising. Online at http://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 at http://education.nationaljournal.com/2009/09/how-can-college-completion-rat.php#1358809.
xiv

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

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

33

xvi

Harry R. Lewis, Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education. 2006: Public Affairs, 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 at http://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 at http://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.

34

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 Obamas Blueprint for ESEA Reauthorization, Quick & the Ed, March 15, 2010, online at http://www.quickanded.com/2010/03/obamas-blueprint-for-esea-reauthorization.html.

35