The decline of the Gap Year

Verityred

How sad for and your likeminded Puritan chums. Your loss, I had a great experience sone moons ago. How dull are these folk?

Tim W

I am at that age too. I'm not taking a gap year because I really don't feel like ending education for a year and then having to go back to it. 'Freedom' only really happens when you've finished education and can do things for as long as you like.

Deferred entry quite rightly should mean it is harder to get in. The universities don't know who you will be competing against the following year. If taking a gap year I would make deferred applications, wait for replies, and if not satisfied apply again the following year.

I couldn't afford a holiday/volunteering-style gap year anyway. There's enough debt at the end of uni anyway. Fair enough if you're going to get a good job for a year but you're going to be better off financially in the long term doing 3 years at uni and then getting a better job in your following year than doing a checkout job and then 3 years at uni.

Andy Carpark

I fear you are in for a rude awakening when you arrive at university. It will be full of witless floozies who twitter things like, 'Ooh Ambrose, you're looking very pre-Raphaelite today,' and 'Ooh Jolyon, you're looking very Byronic today!'

They nothing about anything and would be better employed as milkmaids or, preferably, digging the roads.

A plague on bloody students.

Marcher Baron

I didn't take a gap year in the 60s, either. I reckoned that by the time I'd been round the world, I probably wouldn't want to go back into education! I did my gap year after I'd got my degree and before starting work.

Matt Decker

"with this new branding comes an unshakeable social stigma"

Sorry, but there's nothing new in this. When I went to University in the late 80s the only people who had taken a gap year were those supported by their parents and those who needed to work for a year to support their University career. The first set boasted about how broadening the gap year was for three years; the second (this was Exeter, and we were outnumbered) kept pretty much quiet.
It's always been a pure indulgence and the suggestion that it's adult flowering rather than the last shake of childhood ludicrous.

Verityred

Little Dickie Dork took a gap year, right up his own khyber, he has yet to emerge although I think he has Ed Balls in there with him..

oldtimer

The other day I read that,so far as Oxbridge is concerned, what you do on a gap year is of no account whatsoever. What matters is your academic standard and potential.

Many, many years ago - early 1950s - I had an enforced gap year before university. As I was stony broke, I spent most of it working to earn the cash I needed to supplement my grant and to feed my main self indulgence, a 350CC BSA motorcycle.

Dimoto

I think you are wise, Gap years have had their day.
On the student p.o.v. most seem to have the objective of a "good time" (read excessive amounts of booze and substances)for a year, at dad and mum's expense in somewhere safe and homey like Australia or the US.

From the p.o.v. of "hosts" in non-Anglo countries, the Gap circuit has been around long enough to attract every con-artist, exploiter and predator. Even the humble local has been rendered cynical by the never ending stream of spoiled rich kids. You are most unlikely to experience much of that "old time hospitality".

The hippy trail of yore is long dead.
The Gap trail is an abomination.

Bexleyite

I'm not surprised you're not taking a gap year. Few university applicants I know actually know what one is. They just want to get a degree, get a job and start paying the student loan off.

The whole post reminds me of Max Gogarty's failed blog from 2008, still available here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/blog/2008/feb/14/skinsblog

which followed on from his father's write-up of his family's Thailand holiday experience, still available here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2002/apr/06/bangkok.thailand.familyholidays

The Gogartys must love the internet.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if your post on Coffeehouse wasn't the result of some parent saying, here's £50, fill in my space on Coffeeehouse for me, why don't you talk about why you're not doing a gap year?

Peter From Maidstone

I am sorry, and I don't mean to be rude, but why should I care whether or not you go on a gap year? There are more important matters that it would be nice for the Spectator to occasionally write intelligently about, but it seems that the genuine tradition of Spectator comment is taking a gap year at the moment as well.

Beer Moth

Tim W

" 'Freedom' only really happens when you've finished education and can do things for as long as you like."

Whoever told you this Tim, is a very wicked person.

Ian Walker

Oddly enough, I remember finishing my A-Levels and being told that having a year's break (which would have done me the world of good as I was sick of education at that time) would be frowned upon by the universities I was applying for.

Fast forward about five years, and all of a sudden gap years were the fashion and you were looked upon as some sort of pariah if you hadn't travelled the world and done some charity work. Plus ça change...

It's simple. If you really fit well into the education system, and there's a subject which you're passionate about, go to uni. If you're fed up with school, and not sure what you want to do, take a gap year, preferably making sure you go see some of the poorer bits of the world to make you realise what a spoilt little brat you are (not you, Lara, everyone born and educated in this wonderful first-world country). Alternatively, go get a job - it's not as bad as everyone makes out, and there's nothing to beat the feeling of your first pay packet.

Edward

There's nothing wrong with travelling round the world at parents' expense. The only cause of having a problem with it is envy.

Step off the hamster wheel for a while - there's more to life than getting a First so you can spend the rest of your days getting stressed in an office.