Gap Year Programs Like City Year Provide Alternative to Immediate College Enrollment

Image Source / Getty Images
Image Source / Getty Images
Graduates throwing mortarboards

In September Amy Huynh, a recent high school graduate who was accepted to Colby College in Maine, visited some of her childhood friends during move-in weekend at UCLA. They’re newly minted freshmen, ready to embark on an exciting college career. But Huynh is beginning a different adventure—instead of attending Colby, she’s mentoring middle schoolers in southern Los Angeles for a year.

“A lot of people did not agree with what I was doing,” Huynh says of her decision to defer college enrollment. “College is getting so expensive now, so I said why not. College isn’t going anywhere.”

Huynh is a corps member in City Year, a service organization that places young people between the ages of 17 and 24 in urban schools to work with teachers and mentor students. She’s also one of the thousands of members of the high school class of 2012 who chose to take a break from school — a so-called gap year — instead of immediately enrolling in college.

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About 1.2% of first-time college freshmen choose to defer enrollment for a year, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. What these students choose to do with their time varies widely, from expensive study abroad programs, to volunteer programs like City Year, to staying at home and saving up for college.

“In 1980, no one was talking gap year,” says Holly Bull, the president of The Center for Interim Programs, a company that offers parents and students consulting in choosing the appropriate gap year program. “I’ve watched this whole concept go basically from its inception to present day. I wouldn’t call it mainstream, but there’s way more awareness and support and colleges are now beginning to endorse it as a really positive thing.”

With over 20 years of experience researching gap years, Bull has seen students work everywhere from outdoor education centers to Scottish castles to elephant sanctuaries. She says the students that come to her are often looking for a break from the academic grind. The gap year can provide young people an opportunity to learn what type of adult they want to be. It can also help them gain more focus so they don’t have to spend extra years—and tuition dollars—figuring out the answer to that question on a college campus. “I’m definitely hearing from families that it’s harder to consider these colleges tuitions with a student who seem so uncertain,” she says.

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For Huynh, the decision was about both personal development and economics. While some gap year programs can cost tens of thousands of dollars, City Year is free and provides a living stipend. She’ll get a $5,000 scholarship for participating in City Year that she can apply to her Colby expenses. She also plans to write the school and ask them to join the Give-a-Year partnership program, through which schools provide scholarships to City Year corp members. “That would be awesome,” Huynh says.

Melanie Brennard Mueller, vice president of City Year’s recruitment and admissions, says about 10% of the corps members are high school graduates taking gap years, and they hope to recruit more in the future. “They’re idealistic, they’re highly talented, and they’re excited to do something meaningful before college,” she says. Other volunteer programs, like the Student Conservation Association and World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, also offer students a way to experience different parts of the country or the world on the cheap.

Bob Clagett, the former director of admissions at Middlebury College, says taking a gap year can help students gain a renewed focus on academics. “By stepping off the treadmill, they frequently remind themselves of what their education is all about,” he says. “They kind of reinvent themselves.”

He’s done research to back up the claim. At Middlebury, students who took gap years were found to have higher GPA’s than those who didn’t, even when controlling for things like wealth and high school achievement. A study at the University of North Carolina yielded similar results.

Hyunh, for one, thinks the experience will help her when she finally arrives on campus. She wakes up at 6 a.m. each day to deal with rambunctious preteens— and at times during the school day is the only adult in the classroom. “I’ve personally become more driven,” she says. “Being in a high-stress environment especially, I think that it forces people to grow up really fast.”

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Selective schools typically allow accepted students to defer their enrollment for a year or two, so it makes sense for high schoolers to explore college and gap year opportunities concurrently. Some schools are now even offering formalized versions of gap year programs. Princeton’s Bridge Year Program, for instance, allows selected students to participate in a 9-month community service program abroad. Other schools are partnering with service organizations like City Year and offering scholarships to students who participate.

Some students also use the gap year as a way to bolster their resume, reapplying to colleges with some post-high school experience under their belt. “It’s not a guarantee in terms of getting into college, but it has certainly helped a number of schools in the past,” Bull says. She mentioned one student who was initially wait-listed from Brown University, but then was accepted during her gap year teaching in Costa Rica and Argentina.

The idea that formal education has to be a sprint from age 5 to 21 seems to be changing. Says Clagett, “Getting a job for a year, even if it’s flipping hamburgers, still can be a productive experience and can help students just do something other than think about what they have to do to get into college.”

Apple Maps Wreak Havoc with New Yorker Cover | Mad Magazine

Apple’s new iOS 6 launched last week with much fanfare. But there are some bugs still to be worked out with Apple Maps, according to which Lexington Avenue is in New Jersey, the Washington Monument  has moved across the street and the Brooklyn Bridge is half under the East River. With over a half billion searches in the first few days, the new operating system is creating some unexpected problems.

MAD Magazine NewYorker View 2012

What Happens When Photography Becomes A Commodity? (excellent article)

I believe much of photography is already a commodity and I plan to speak about it during the ASMP Symposium next Thursday the 27th in New York at the Times Center. The topic for the event (more details here) is “Sustainable Business Models: Issues and Trends Facing Visual Artists” which is a topic I’ve been thinking and writing about since I started this blog. the ASMP goes on to say “the rules of the game have changed and it’s no longer business as usual in today’s crowded visual arts marketplace” which to me leads to an obvious conclusion: photography is a commodity.

Commodification is a scary thought. It means you are competing on price and racing to the bottom.

Ok, so that’s the bad news. But, there’s an upside. Before we get to that, let’s destroy this cliché that I hear all the time how “photographers brought it on”, because they didn’t do something to prevent it. All the bitching and whining about weak willed photographers who wont hold the line and clients who wont pay the fees. Commodification is a natural market process. You cannot stop this.

To see the upside you need to take a more nuanced view of photography. You need to consider photography services a value chain and the act of taking a picture, what I like to call being a “camera operator”, as one part of this value chain. You also need to understand that commodification occurs when the improvements to a product overshoot the needs of the client. Better equipment and techniques matter little to the majority of clients. There will always be exceptions, but sadly, it seems we are all past the point of good enough (even if in some parts of the industry good enough is distirbingly low). Nevertheless, don’t dwell on it. Technology that blew your mind ten years ago is now completely commodified. It can’t be stopped.

The upside is that if you have commodification, somewhere else in the value chain a reciprocal process of de-commoditization is at work. In the book I’m reading now (The Innovator’s Solution) author Clayton M. Christensen goes on to say that “commoditization destroys a company’s ability to capture profits by undermining differentiability, de-commoditization affords opportunities to create and capture potentially enormous wealth.”

You just have to find the spot in the value chain where performance is not yet good enough, where you can differentiate yourself by being better than the others. Exciting, right?

I have lots of thoughts on this that I will get into during the symposium but here’s one simple observation.

Not too long ago your personality mattered little in photography. You could be the most abhorrent dick-wad and land all the work you wanted if your photography was awesome. I see plenty of evidence now that this is not longer possible. An art director I sat on a panel with even said “the top 5 photographers for a car shoot are all qualified to do the job. it comes down to personality as to who will get the job” Personality is one tiny part of the value chain, but it’s now more important than the photography. That’s astounding.

Sad if you enjoy operating cameras, but very exciting if you enjoy the entire value chain of photography services. My favorite photographers to work with have always been the creative problem solvers. Now I can clearly see the de-commodization at work.

by A Photo Editor on September 19, 2012 · 56 comments