Why some college students should take a gap year next year
For the record, I understand this is not for everyone, and that there are certain circumstances where this might not hold true (ie if you were to lose your financial aid by deferring a year). But here is where I’m coming from:
When you are 18-21 years old, the idea of pushing graduation/your “career” out by a year is blasphemy. What if everyone else gets ahead of you? You need to enter the workforce now! Etc etc etc. Now that I am ripe and 30, it’s more obvious that putting things on hold by a year makes no difference in the long term. tl/dr - punting college graduation a year down the line has very little downsides.
College this year is going to be very different, in a bad way. College is a once in a lifetime experience (shoutout UCSB), and going to classes via Zoom from your parent’s living room is not worth the tuition, whatever the amount. Even if your college does reopen physically, the chances that a tenured professor decides to spend time in a classroom with a bunch of twenty-somethings is… low. If you assume that you will be able to eventually get something closer to the “original” experience later on, why pay $15K (or $40K?) to take Zoom classes and miss out on the networking, clubs, and $@&%$ of a college experience. Do that a year from now, once things (fingers crossed) go back to normal. Tuition is ridiculously expensive… wait, and get what you are actually paying for.
So what would I do?
Learn something. Try something. Start a business and fail. Volunteer. Get your real estate license. Do a poorly paid internship and see what you hate/love. Offer to do marketing/sales for a local small business and ask if they will pay you per client you send their way. Learn Chinese. Even if you make zero money, you will be net-zero instead of paying thousands of dollars to learn from a professor on Zoom.
Gap years used to be about travel, but fuck travel. Now you can watch Youtube videos that teach you how to build an online store, or start a Zoom-based tutoring service for high school students, or offer to do free intern work for a company in your neighborhood and learn sales skills or handiwork or literally anything more useful than whatever your major is. Try your hand at sales and offer to only make money on commission. If I were in college, I would use this next year to either bolster the F out of my resume, or try starting a business, basically risk-free (if you fail, you go back to college in a year when you can actually sit in classes IRL).
Best case scenario? Whatever you are doing turns into something real. And you never go back. College degrees are overrated, and great businesses are caring less and less about degrees. Make shit happen.
Update: here is my follow on post about Some things to do instead of going to college
