Survey after survey has shown that 2020’s prospective college students are rethinking their plans. And while it’s too early to tell how many students colleges will lose, skyrocketing interest in gap-year programs could signal what’s to come.
According to Ethan Knight, the Gap Year Association, where Knight is the executive director and founder, has seen unique page views on its website double and a 380-percent jump in searches of its program directory compared to July of last year. Some gap-year programs report filling their cohorts a month early and opening more slots to meet the demand. And gap-year consultants predict those numbers will grow as colleges solidify their plans for the fall.
This is the first year a correlation between low enrollment numbers at colleges and high interest in gap years could be drawn, Knight said — if deferrals match these early indicators. So far, they’ve been on par with previous years, as students seem tepid about pulling the trigger on a gap year.
“We’ll see what actually happens,” Knight said.
Safety in Lower Numbers
The Gap Year Association, a nonprofit that works with students, gap programs, and colleges to make gap years more accessible to students, estimates that 40,000 students take a gap year annually. Typically a hiatus from formal education between high school and college, a gap year is “usually made up of a variety of small components,” often “real-world experiences, wrapped up with some paid work, some career exploration, and some volunteering,” Knight said. Under normal circumstances, that might include traveling across Europe or community service in impoverished areas.
Most gap-year programs will look a bit different this year. In many cases, international travel is out of the question, and some fall programs plan to wrap up before Thanksgiving. But they still hold appeal for students seeking an alternative to online learning and for parents concerned about safety.
Structured programs usually host a small group of students, typically under 20 for each experience they offer. Within the confines of a small cohort, it’s easier to be safe than at a campus full of students, Knight said.
This fall, the High Mountain Institute will be treating its outdoors-based gap-year groups as “family units” with 10 to 12 students and just a few instructors.
“The benefit of a wilderness gap program … It just limits exposure,” said Danny O’Brien, the head of school at the High Mountain Institute. He said that while colleges have to worry about mitigating the risk of students living on campus and off, his program won’t because it will operate as a “closed circuit.”
By June, the program, which typically doesn’t fill up until July or August, was already fully enrolled, O’Brien said. High Mountain will add another section and expects to enroll 50 percent more students than normal this fall.
Polls conducted this spring suggest that incoming freshmen were more likely than returning students to be considering a gap year in the face of Covid-19.
In Sallie Mae’s How America Pays for College survey, only 2 percent of undergraduates and their families reported they planned to take a year off.
Meanwhile, an Art & Science Group poll of college-bound high-school seniors showed that 17 percent doubted they will be pursuing their plan to attend a four-year institution in the fall. Of those students, 35 percent said they decided to take a gap year instead.
“I think that normally, as a society, we are always run, run, run,” said Charlie Taibi, CEO of the gap-year program Year On. “I think it’s a great time to think, ‘What do I actually want to do?’ There’s been a real shift in what is important to do.”
Taibi said Year On has seen a lot of increased interest — and not just from curious students. The program’s college partners are reaching out and telling Taibi that they need to de-densify their campuses, and a gap-year experience might just be the key.
Portland State University, which partners with at least two gap-year programs, Verto Education and Carpe Diem, has seen a rise in students requesting gap years. Eki Yandall, director of domestic recruitment at Portland State, said the university presumes this is a direct result of Covid-19 and that students have the option to defer fall term to winter, spring, or summer.
Weighing Their Options
Tuition money isn’t the only thing colleges stand to lose to gap-year programs this fall. Austin Rogers, the U.S. admissions officer at Pacific Discovery — which facilitates travel- and service-based gap programs for students — created an alternative to on-campus housing for students whose class are online. With Discovery Campus, small groups of students complete their coursework at otherwise empty resorts and holiday destinations across the country. The program has received 50 applications so far, and Rogers anticipates 30 more.
Rogers said Pacific Discovery was contacted by a father of a student at Southern Methodist University who said he was nervous seeing the spikes in cases in Texas and was concerned about the lack of information coming out of SMU about how to ensure students’ safety. Another family reached out when they learned their Bowdoin College student would not among the small selection allowed back on campus in the fall.
“My conversations with students, none of them are asking, ‘Why should we take a gap year right now?’” said Rogers. “They’re coming in droves to us.”
But gap years aren’t a realistic option for many students.
Richard Hesel, a principal at the Art & Science Group, said a lot of the interest in gap years is from affluent families, which he said could hurt universities’ net tuition revenue because those students are more likely to pay full price.
Though Knight, the Gap Year Association founder, noted that some gap-year programs, like AmeriCorps, VisitOz, and Camphill Schools, pay students a stipend, others can cost them $15,000 to $19,000 for a semester with travel experience, or $32,000 for a full year.
A Gap Year Association study from 2015 shows that students who take gap years skew toward the upper class, socioeconomically. Their families, Hesel explained, are often more willing and able to pay for semester-long programs that don’t result in college credit.
“With Covid-19, these advantages are even more powerful, as the pandemic has had much greater affect on lower-income families,” he said.
Hesel wonders if students will just defer going to college for one year — not a formal gap year, but just a yearlong pause: “What are students going to do? Take a gap year in their parents’ basement?”
Tanishq Kumar, a student at Harvard University, had his gap-year plans dashed by Covid-19. Instead of traveling last semester, he had to hunker down at home.
In the process, he found that there wasn’t a streamlined way curious students could learn more about creating their own gap years, and he wanted to compile information about what possibilities were out there and what they could offer students.
“I think, fundamentally, there are a few needs that have begged something to fill them,” Kumar said.
So in June he launched Covid Gap Years, a platform where students can network with other young people who have completed or are completing gap years. The information on the site is crowdsourced from people who have taken a gap year or had planned on taking one before having to adapt their plans amid the pandemic.
Only a month into its existence, the site already had regular users and over 20,000 visits.
‘Tying Our Hands’
But the heightened interest in gap-year programs is no guarantee students will enroll.
Knight said gap-year programs are grappling with the same questions as colleges, regarding testing and obligation to students who contract the coronavirus.
“We, as a field, are doing really good work, but it’s tying our hands quite a lot,” Knight said.
Many programs are shortening their duration or expanding their refund policies. Some are taking a page out of colleges’ playbooks and starting programs earlier or planning on concluding at Thanksgiving. Plus, they have to be conscious of bringing infected students into new cities.
International destinations are cutting off access for students, and programs are turning to domestic opportunities.
Abby Falik, the founder and CEO of Global Citizen Year, said she knew in April that it wasn’t going to be acceptable to send students into the world: “It was a hard decision, but it felt really clear.” Falik’s program relies heavily on its international component, but her team realized that the risk of spreading infection went beyond travelers and to the communities they’d visit.
At the same time, it became clear that a number of students weren’t going to go back to school in the fall.
In response, Falik partnered with Minerva, an online-learning platform, to create Global Citizen Academy, an online program students enroll in for 10 to 15 hours a week to complete two courses, and attend lectures and workshops. Tuition is offered on a sliding scale, from $500 to $7,500, based on need.
Applications have rolled in for this online experience. Class size for the Global Citizen Academy hasn’t been finalized yet as they’re still accepting applications through the end of the month.
“Global Citizen Academy is like a scaffolding upholding whatever else they are doing,” Falik said. “The reason to enroll with us is not to check a bunch of credits off the list — you can do that at a lot of places. The reason to enroll with us is because you’re antsy to rebuild the world.”
Another gap-year company, Year On, had been planning to launch a virtual mentorship, development, and volunteer program, and the pandemic made the move only more relevant. The virtual program can be paired with a student’s first semester.
While Year On has already experienced more than double the usual amount of website clicks this application period, Taibi, its CEO, said he expects to see a deluge of applicants once colleges are more definitive about what the fall will look like.
