The Edge

Hi. I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, covering innovation in and around academe. Subscribe here. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week:

Making a “gap year” more than an overseas vacation.

“The best freshman year is a gap year.” That was the headline on a commentary piece The Chronicle ran a few months ago. It was co-written by the founder and a vice president of Global Citizen Year, a nonprofit group that sends young people to live and work in small communities in Brazil, Ecuador, India, or Senegal, supervised by in-country mentors.

It’s a compelling argument. After all, once a teenager spends a year immersed in another culture, living with a local family and working in a job like teacher’s aide, it stands to reason that she’d be more mature socially, better equipped to handle the rigors of college, and more self-directed about her studies.

But who’s to say that reasoning is actually true?

Global Citizen Year produces an annual report on the outcomes of its 700 alumni, pointing to some impressive results. (They complete college and study foreign languages at much higher rates than typical students; 79 percent report that the experience strengthened their “moral courage.”) But most of the discussion about the value of gap years is still largely anecdotal.

With the recent formation of the Gap Year Research Consortium, that’s about to change.

The consortium grew out of informal meetings among representatives of colleges that are big into gap years, and the folks at Global Citizen Year. It will be based at Colorado College, where about one out of 10 of students has taken a gap year before enrolling as a freshman.

The parameters of the group’s research are still being worked out, but it’s likely to include such topics as whether gap-year students show higher persistence rates in college. It will also probably study ways to make such experiences more widely available, so that, as Global Citizen Year’s founder, Abby Falik, put it to me the other day, “this isn’t just a nice option for privileged kids.”

Falik isn’t just blowing smoke on that point. Her concern for equity has been a fundamental part of her mission since she began the program, 10 years ago, with 11 participants — or, as the program calls them, fellows. While many commercial gap-year programs do tend to draw from upper-income families, 49 percent of Global Citizen Year’s fellows come from low-income backgrounds; 45 percent are students of color.

The program charges tuition to families that can pay, but only about 20 percent of its 150 participants each year pay the full $30,000. The rest receive full or partial financial aid. Falik spends a lot of her time chasing donors.

I’ve been intrigued with Global Citizen Year since first meeting Falik two years ago at a SXSW EDU conference, where she passionately made the case for the value of her program as a broadening experience that helps make people more empathetic and open to other cultures, especially those that push students a little beyond their comfort zones.

All in on the idea

Considering where the program sends its students (no cushy billets like Sydney or Florence), I was all in on that idea. Given the recent displays of nationalism and nativism in the United States and around the world, such experiences seem even more important than ever.

When we spoke last week, as Global Citizen Year announced a dozen new college partners that will promote its program as an option for incoming students, I was taken by the way Falik is trying to reframe these experiences. As she puts it, she’s hoping that the gap year is regarded “not as a year off, or frankly, ‘a gap.’ It can be the most enriching part of young person’s education.”

Another way of thinking about this: compared with the “micro-internship” learning experiences enabled by the gig economy, which I wrote about in last week’s newsletter, these are the macro versions.

With the research consortium underway, Falik is now exploring whether there’s a way to gain formal accreditation for the program, so that students really could more easily use it as a replacement for their freshman year, without having to petition their colleges for credit. That could help make the program more attractive to a wider swath of students than it is now, when it is typically seen as an add-on. As she notes, “there are limits to a model that says, Let’s make college longer and more expensive.”

She’s right about that. So maybe a version of a now-paused experiment that it ran with the New School, in New York, which gave a semester’s worth of credit for taking part in the Global Citizen Year program, could work.

Falik is also looking for ways to expand. The program has grown to about 150 students a year. By 2024 she’s like to see that at 1,000.

I’m hitting the road this week. See you in Atlanta at AAC&U?

Are you attending the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges & Universities this week? Please join me and Dan Berrett, an editor of The Chronicle‘s Teaching newsletter, for a meet-up on Thursday, January 24, from from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at Twenty-Two Storys, a bar in the atrium lobby of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta.

Earlier that day I’ll be talking about “The Fierce Urgency of the Adult Student” with Louis Soares, from the American Council on Education; David Scobey, who directs Bringing Theory to Practice; and Adam Bush, provost of the newly accredited experimental institution called College Unbound. Dan will be there to moderate a pre-meeting plenary on Value rubrics. We look forward to seeing you at the sessions and schmoozing with you at the meet-up.

Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com.