A growing number of students are asking whether taking a gap year before college is the right choice for them. After the intensity of high school and the college application process, many feel burned out, unsure about their academic direction, or eager for real-world experience before beginning college. A well-planned gap year can offer time to rest, reflect, and develop maturity and purpose, while also helping students enter college more ready to thrive.
At the same time, a gap year isn’t the right path for everyone. Understanding what a gap year can offer, why students take them, and the benefits and challenges involved can help families decide whether this option supports long-term growth.
This guide brings together evidence, examples, and practical considerations to help you determine whether a gap year is a good idea for your student and what to do with that year if you choose to take it.
A gap year is a structured or self-directed break between high school and college that gives students time to grow personally, academically, or professionally before beginning undergraduate study. Students may work, volunteer, travel, complete internships, pursue language study, or engage in service-learning or cultural immersion programs. At its core, a gap year provides space to step away from the traditional pace of schooling and invest in experiences that build independence, maturity, and clarity about one’s goals.
Colleges increasingly support the idea, noting that students who take a gap year often arrive more engaged, confident, and ready to take advantage of the academic and social opportunities of college life.
The history of the gap year, typically the year between high school and college, is long and varied. It was first ‘named’ in the ‘60s in the UK when Nicholas Maclean-Bristol created Project Trust that sent three volunteers from the UK to Ethiopia.
The primary purpose of these post-World War II teenagers was to promote peace and understanding, in hopes of preventing another great war. Several gap year companies were subsequently formed and several still play an important role today.
Since those early days, the notion of high school graduates having the ability to complete a year of community service, travel, education, enhanced global understanding and the development of greater self-awareness, before entering the college classroom has grown in importance and popularity.
Students choose to take a gap year for many different reasons, often grounded in readiness, curiosity, or a desire for personal growth. While every student’s path is unique, these are some of the most common motivations we see when supporting families through this decision:
A gap year can provide space for students to slow down, reflect, and approach college with clearer goals and a stronger sense of purpose.
A gap year can be an enormously helpful step for some students and less so for others. Over the years, we’ve seen the full range. What tends to matter most is the student’s openness to using the year with purpose rather than simply stepping away from school.
Many students come out of a gap year with a different sense of themselves. They’ve had time to breathe after the intensity of high school, and that pause often allows them to notice what they’re genuinely curious about rather than what they have felt expected to pursue. When students spend the year working, traveling, or contributing to a community, they often return with a steadier confidence, the kind that grows from navigating real responsibilities and moving through unfamiliar situations.
Some of the positive outcomes we commonly see include:
Long-term academic benefits, with many gap year students performing well and persisting through college.
There are also situations in which a gap year is not the best choice. Some students struggle without the built-in structure of school and may find the unbounded nature of a gap year more overwhelming than freeing. Others lose academic momentum if their year doesn’t include some form of intellectual engagement, even light.
Challenges families should consider include:
Most importantly, a gap year is not a cure-all. If a student hopes the year will remove stress or solve deeper challenges without support, the experience may fall short. The most successful gap years we’ve seen are shaped intentionally, with the right balance of guidance and independence to help students move toward adulthood in a meaningful way.
Students use their gap year in many ways, often combining several experiences that reflect their interests, responsibilities, and emerging sense of purpose. What matters most is not how far a student travels or how structured the year appears, but whether the experiences help them grow in ways that support a healthy transition to college.
What should you do on a gap year? Students pursue many different paths, but they often fall into these categories:
Students may remain close to home, volunteering locally, taking an evening class in a foreign language, caring for aging relatives, or working to make some money for college – or all the above! These experiences can be especially meaningful for students who want to contribute to their family or community while preparing for the independence of college.
Some students widen their perspective by engaging with communities and cultures beyond their home. Others with greater resources may choose to travel overseas to work with endangered animals or impoverished communities, staying with a family and learning a new language.
For students who benefit from more structure and guidance, organized gap year programs, both abroad and in the U.S., provide mentorship, skill-building, and community engagement within a supportive framework.
Some students split the year between six months of work and six months of community service, while others commit fully to a single program. Either way, these experiences expose students to new ways of living, thinking, and contributing.
For many students, the heart of a successful gap year lies in developing a clearer understanding of themselves. This may include time for therapy, outdoor leadership programs, creative pursuits, or intentionally stepping back from the intense pace of high school.
Many types of students pursue this year of personal growth, from good students to those who struggled in high school. Today’s teens are often so pressured, so busy, and can become burnt out and need a break before returning to the classroom. Colleges want students to arrive ready to learn, and some institutions even build delayed entry or mid-year starts into their admissions models, recognizing that students may benefit from additional time before beginning college.
We asked Jamie Paul, an educational consultant at McMillan Education, with extensive experience supporting students on traditional and non-traditional educational paths, to share stories of students whose gap years led to meaningful transformation. These stories show what’s possible when students take time to discover what matters to them.
“Alex, a hard-working student with a traumatic past, looked with me at likely transfer colleges and still, many weeks into the application process, found himself and his plans for a future in business leaving him flat.
Eventually, he recalled his time working part-way toward a pilot’s license during high school and lit up in a way I hadn’t seen — and he hadn’t felt — when he had been checking off the boxes of the transfer process and writing about an interest in business that wasn’t really there.
This spark eventually led to a successful Calculus class in the evenings during a spring term away from college and enrolment the next fall at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach. He pivoted away from the college-as-usual, life plan-by-default style of checking off boxes to pursue something unique to his life experiences and interests.
This built my confidence in the potential of the work I do, but it also showed me that even students who know they want to transfer can begin — and perhaps complete — even this very personal process without taking real risks and investing themselves in ways that will launch them on a new trajectory.”
“Two other tech-oriented students I worked with found themselves overwhelmed by college for a web of reasons — which I think is most often the case — including a lack of initiative and self-advocacy skills, weak in-person relationship skills, and an academic direction that demanded more sacrifices of auxiliary interests than they were willing to make.
One identified creative writing as equally important to math and engineering classes. He found a hybrid liberal arts/engineering college with room for both. The other left a world-renowned tech college to attend a college closer to home, return to laboratory science work that he had enjoyed as an intern, and have time in his schedule to choose electives in psychology.
Both these young men used a good portion of their time away from college learning about themselves through intensive therapy that made them more reflective, flexible, open, and adaptive. As they headed off on their new college adventure, everyone involved knew their success would be much more likely given the improved balance of an external, programmatic match and more robust life skills and internal resources.”
Choosing to take a gap year is ultimately about creating a year with purpose rather than filling time. What matters most is having a plan that reflects who the student is becoming and what they hope to carry with them into college. Some gap years follow a clear structure from the start, while others evolve across different experiences; either approach can work when the year is shaped with intention and supported by thoughtful guidance.
Families often find the decision becomes clearer once they begin mapping possibilities and imagining what the year could look like in practice. Exploring options, outlining priorities, and discussing what a successful year might include can turn an abstract idea into a concrete path forward.
If you’d like help thinking through what this might look like for your student, our educational consultants are glad to talk through the possibilities and offer perspective. You’re welcome to schedule a free consultation to explore next steps.
