We can’t tell you how many parents who first come to us after their children more or less strike out in the highly selective college admissions process are of the mind that their children should take a gap year and then re-apply to colleges. And they’re so utterly convinced this is in the best interest of their children. And, heck, if you read The Wall Street Journal, you’d be convinced too. 

Think a Gap Year Will Boost Your Odds? Think Again

As Alex Janin writes for The Wall Street Journal in a piece entitled “Seeking College-Admissions Edge, More Students Take Gap Year,” “Rising rejections at highly-selective colleges and hopes for better luck in a year are pushing more seniors to take a yearlong pause after high school. For the 2020-21 academic year, 130,000 students took gap years, according to the nonprofit Gap Year Association, with many of these early-pandemic gap-year students deferring enrollment to wait for the full college experience. That is up from between 40,000 and 60,000 students before the pandemic.” But always keep in mind your source. Do you think the Gap Year Association, nonprofit or not, is going to say that taking a gap year is going to scare off many an admissions officer at elite universities? We didn’t think so. And might the pandemic have something to do with this upswing in gap-yearers? We will let you be the judge!

Gap Years Put Highly Qualified Students At An Admissions Disadvantage

As loyal readers of our college admissions blog know all too well, we don’t sugarcoat anything about the highly selective college admissions process because we believe students and parents are better served with the cold, hard truth. And the cold, hard truth is that many admissions officers get scared when a student is a year removed from a high school curriculum. Does the student remember calculus? Has the student’s brain gone to mush so many months after completing high school? And, with the notable exception of students who take a postgraduate (PG) year at a high school after their high school graduation, no matter what a student does during that gap year, no matter how prestigious of a pursuit parents may think it is, these fears of admissions officers will unlikely be alleviated.

Transfer Applicants Are More Successful Than Gap Year Applicants

Hence our word to the wise: don’t take a gap year after high school if it can be avoided! There’s rarely a good reason to take a gap year after high school. For a more comprehensive weighing of the pros and cons of this decision, however, check out our post on the subject.

Are you wondering about Ivy Coach’s advice to students who first come to us after more or less striking out in the highly selective college admissions process? It’s simple. If you’re not willing to do a PG year at a school that offers PG years, go to the best university you got into — and then transfer. In fact, work on your transfer applications this coming summer so they’re basically all ready to submit come March (save for some changes based on what you’ve been doing while in college — though we help map all this out for students the summer before they matriculate). This way, you can enjoy your first year of college and forget about the transfer process. You can get great grades in interesting courses, make wonderful new friends, and live! And, in our view, your odds of getting into a top university are much stronger as a transfer than after taking a gap year — no matter how prestigious your parents may think your gap year activity may be.

Start Early With Ivy Coach If You Want to Skip the Waitlist

But, of course, this conversation is irrelevant to the families who come to us early enough in their child’s educational career because we put our students in positions where they earn acceptances from the top schools in the country, not deferrals. If you’d like to optimize your child’s odds of admission to a highly selective school, fill out our complimentary consultation form and we’ll be in touch.