admissions committees support gap years

“Much evidence has shown that students who take a gap year bring more to their college experiences and derive more from them as well. What often happens is that students end up ‘reinventing’ themselves during their gap year, discovering where their true talents lie, and helping them bring a more mature outlook to their education in the future.

On the academic performance front, several studies show that students who take a gap year end up doing better than their non-gap year classmates. On average, those students have shown a clear pattern of having higher G.P.A.’s than would otherwise have been predicted.”

— Robert Clagett, a former dean of admissions at Middlebury College and former senior admissions officer at Harvard College, from an article written for the New York Times, December 2011