<p>You’ve probably made your decision already, but…</p>
<p>I would go to MIT barring any anticipated problems with fit. It would be very hard to spend a gap year while all of your peers are off learning and having fun at college. In fact, it would be agonizing, unless you found a truly fulfilling activity that would serve as enough of a distraction – which is unlikely given the small window of time in which you could have procured such an option. There is undoubtedly a threshold that a school should meet if one is to give up the chance of going to Harvard, even if their enrollment at Harvard is delayed. But MIT is certainly above this threshold, and is arguably one of the top 5 schools in the country.</p>