Going to college? Take some time off first

In the electric and nostalgic week between my sister's final day of high school and her graduation on Friday, my father decided he would email her a daily dose of his wisdom on college. Drawing from his own time at UNC and from watching my brother and I make our ways through college, his missives have covered topics from roommate relations to course registration, the longest one covering bathroom etiquette.

It got me thinking about the students who have approached me over the last few years to ask about my own experiences and advice from college. I think of my late German professor who signed his emails "Work Hard, Be Brilliant," because he certainly had those priorities in the right order. I find a lot of truth in the adage, "Show me your friends, and I'll show you your future." Surely, the last thing I'd do is advise them to do what I did at Duke. They'd get more sleep in Navy SEALs training.

But now having lived in the U.K. for the last two years, and having traveled as widely as my stipend will allow, I think I would give a different answer to those planning to go to college. I might tell them not to go. Well, not immediately, anyway.

Outside the United States, the concept of a "gap year" between secondary school and university is a common one and has its roots in the U.K. Many students take a year out to travel internationally, to work and earn money for university, or to do both on an international working holiday. International volunteering and relief work has become particularly popular among "gappers." A gap-year industry has emerged to advise students on international aid projects, language immersion programs, and discount round-the-world adventures.

The gap-year phenomenon has not taken a similar hold in the United States. In the UK, about 11 percent of all students take them before university, with as many as a third from prestigious prep schools doing so. But in the U.S., admissions officers say the increasing stress of college admissions makes parents nervous about any path that's out of the ordinary. Nevertheless, Harvard has been urging its admitted students to consider a year out since the 1970s, and Princeton announced in February that it is at work on a program to send a tenth of its admitted class abroad for a year of social service work before ever setting foot on campus.

They have good reason to do so. Studies have shown that students who take the year out are more motivated and focused when they get to campus, not less so. Students can use that year to try something new and turn their hobbies and interests into life-long passions and topics to engage with at university. The character, judgment, and experience they develop might foster in them a more mature attitude toward their studies. Perhaps a gap-year culture could even force down the 30 percent  dropout rate for freshmen across America's colleges and universities, many of whom enter college without ever thinking of why.

A gap year might also have something to teach students on the other end of the spectrum, those grade-obsessed undergraduates who spend their days and nights in the libraries or labs, relentlessly stressing over the next test. This is a mentality peculiar to the American undergraduate, which sociologists at the University of Kansas described in the 1960s as the "GPA perspective." Think of the added perspective those students could have on what "success" means by interning at a non-profit community organizing office or by working 14-hour days in a Vietnamese orphanage before starting college work.

It's worth noting, too, that the unfortunate cultural illiteracy of many American undergraduates, as documented by several anthropologists studying them, can be immediately ameliorated by the first-hand international experiences of students in their gap years. A year spent traveling the Middle East, this generation's version of the Grand Tour, would go a long way in cultivating a class of students well-prepared for and sensitive to the foreign policy issues the U.S. will be facing during our lifetimes.

A gap year will not be right for everyone. But as my time winds down here in Oxford, with its moments of extreme etiquette and ancient traditions (wearing white-tie attire and gowns to take exams comes to mind), I can't help but be excited that the time might be arriving to reimagine and broaden our conceptions of the traditional paths to college success. For, as we know, education and schooling are often not the same thing.

Congratulations to the Class of 2008, and congratulations Helen!

 Adam D. Chandler of Burlington is a graduate of Williams High School and Duke University who won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University in England.