GAP YEAR

TRANSCRIPT MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: This is Radio Boston and I’m Meghna Chakrabarti. ANTHONY BROOKS: And I’m Anthony Brooks. This is the season when high school students across the State and the country wait anxiously to hear back from colleges and universities. MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: But, here’s a recommendation from a growing number of college advisors and career counselors. Don’t go to college next year. Now they’re not saying skip college all together, but rather just wait a year, put it off, travel, work, live abroad, do something productive. ANTHONY BROOKS: In fact, taking a year off, a so-called “gap year” between high school and college is not a new idea, but it’s becoming increasingly popular and a lot more accepted across the US. And there’s even evidence to suggest that students who take a gap year actually do better in college than students who don’t. And joining us to talk a bit about that is Robert Clagett. Welcome to Radio Boston, Robert Clagett. Good to have you. ROBERT CLAGETT: Thank you Anthony, it’s great to be here. ANTHONY BROOKS: First, tell me what you observed about these students when you were at Middlebury. ROBERT CLAGETT: It actually applied to both the students that I saw at Middlebury and the students at Harvard over many, many years. The students who took a gap year, it was really clear that they had grown up, they had matured, they’d become more focused during their gap year. They didn’t, I would say, engage in some of the kinds of first year antics so to speak, that we see a lot of first years involved in; and they approached their educations with just a different level of maturity.