Why Colleges Should Require a Gap Year

James Yang for The Chronicle

In July the Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg rolled out a $20-billion plan to enlist young people in national service after high school. In the bitterly polarized age of Donald Trump, Buttigieg argued, Americans need a shared enterprise to bind them together.

“We really need to talk about the threat to social cohesion that helps characterize this presidency but also this era,” Buttigieg told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “One thing we could do that would change that would be to make it — if not legally obligatory but certainly a social norm — that anybody after they’re 18 spends a year in national service.”

He’s right. But the same political polarization that he lamented will almost certainly sandbag Buttigieg’s proposal. When Rep. Charles B. Rangel of New York introduced legislation to make national service compulsory, in 2013, it didn’t even make it to a floor vote. And President Trump’s 2020 budget would go in the opposite direction, calling for the elimination of the national agency that runs AmeriCorps and several other large service programs.

Then there’s that pesky thing called the Constitution, which bars involuntary servitude. Even if a national-service bill miraculously passed, the courts might strike it down.

That’s why our colleges and universities need to step up. Although the federal government is unlikely to require national service, we could. And the benefits would be extraordinary — not just for our students and our country, but for higher education itself.

Have you noticed how many people don’t like us? According to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey, 61 percent of Americans think higher education is headed in the wrong direction. Republicans are more concerned about what they call the liberal bias of our institutions, while Democrats worry more about rising tuition costs. But both of them wonder: What the heck is going on up at the college?

A compulsory-service year would provide one very clear answer: We’re creating better citizens, and a better country. It isn’t just that required service would benefit our students, who would be exposed to the diversity and complexity of America. It would also make our nation a more decent and humane place, for everyone.

Our students would clean up our parks and rivers. They would visit senior citizens. They would serve food at homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and prisons. They would assist teachers in kindergartens and elsewhere at schools. They would help disabled people perform daily tasks.

Along the way, they would meet thousands of people who are not like them. That would burst their college bubbles, where they are too often surrounded by the like-minded. And it would revive the original purpose of our educational institutions: to produce civically informed and dedicated Americans.

Some people might elect to do their service right after high school, taking a “gap year” before starting college. Others might do it after a few years of study. But no students could graduate from college without serving their country. And both the college and the country would be better for it.

A handful of institutions — including Princeton and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — already offer aid to students who want to defer their admission for a year. And last year, Duke announced it would provide scholarships for 15 to 20 accepted students who undertake approved gap-year projects.

But most of those efforts fund students who go abroad, often on expensive, sponsored volunteer trips. While her father was still in the White House — and before she enrolled at Harvard — Malia Obama went on a pricey service-learning trip to Bolivia and Peru. It’s hard to imagine less-wealthy institutions or families ponying up for that.

But colleges might team up with domestic agencies like AmeriCorps or the Student Conservation Association, which provides gap-year opportunities in habitat restoration and other environmental activities. Depending on the circumstances, colleges might also offer course credit for service. At the New School, in New York, students taking a gap year with the school’s partner organization can earn up to a full year of academic credit. That way, service doesn’t add to the overall length — or the cost — of college.

Making service compulsory for everyone would erase the elitist shine of gap years, which are too often reserved for the privileged. And it would announce that our colleges are working for the nation, in the most elemental way: by providing an army of young Americans who will assist wherever they are needed.

Like any big change, this one would have to start on a small scale. There would be lots of resistance from institutions that feared losing applicants — and, of course, tuition dollars — by requiring a service year. But a few elite colleges could get the ball rolling. Princeton already provides gap-year opportunities abroad; would its candidate pool suffer if it required a service year at home? I doubt it.

Other selective institutions might announce that they would give preference to candidates who indicate a willingness to serve for a year, just as they do for people who apply early. Given the competitive madness surrounding admissions right now, that might be enough to create the critical mass that the movement needs.

At less-selective institutions, meanwhile, officials might offer a tuition discount to people electing a service year. They might also give scholarships to students who are caring for relatives or have other financial exigencies that would make it difficult to live on the modest stipends that AmeriCorps and other service organizations provide.

Eventually, a service year would become as established as freshman English and a foreign language. And why not? We already require years of classes and credits for a college degree. It would be a credit to our colleges — and to our nation — if we required a service year, too. We don’t have to wait for the right Congress, or for the right president, to do the right thing.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America, which will be published in the fall by the Johns Hopkins University Press.