<p>Gap years are a lot more popular than they were in our day. But because many of us parents don't have personal experience with them, if our kids want to take a year between high school and college, we tend to have a lot of questions, and they tend to have questions that we can't answer. In case anyone is interested, here's a summary of our family's experience with our daughter's year abroad before college.</p>
<p>SUMMARY: She did go abroad; she didn't do City Year, or take a year to earn money for college, or to decompress, or to learn more about herself (explicitly, I mean) before college. She did apply to college her senior year, choose one of the colleges she'd been admitted to, and then defer her enrollment for a year. (*NOTE: I cannot recommend this approach highly enough. **It would be *much more complicated to apply to college for abroad, and I would avoid that hassle if at all possible.) She isn't back quite yet. She'll return to the States in about 10 days (and then be home less than a week before she jets off to be a summer camp counselor 750 miles from home!).</p>
<p>THE GOOD: Our daughter really has become more competent. She gets around cities on buses; she gets herself back and forth between cities; she goes into shops and deals with shopkeepers in the local language (a language in which she had some basic skill before she left). And after a close call, she now watches the balance in her bank account.</p>
<p>She has come to tolerate her parents' ongoing involvement in her life better. When she was leaving, she didn't want us to have access to her U.S. bank accounts, her college portal, etc. We submitted to her that we weren't just trying to be busybodies. We said that when adults go abroad for a year (for business, with the armed forces, whatever), they often choose somebody in the U.S. to act as their agent and handle their domestic business for them. All we wanted was to serve as her agents. She acquiesced unhappily; she is now glad she agreed.</p>
<p>We have made some progress ourselves in trying to meddle only in the big things, and let the smaller stuff go. We tend to micromanage. We always have. We still do, but less so. In a way, we needed her to take a gap year, so we could develop some skills in the area of butting the heck out.</p>
<p>She has grown weary of 18-year-olds who are out of their parents' direct supervision and control for the first time. She finds that "reveling in my newfound freedom" stuff a little tiresome. I hope she still will next year, when she has midterms to take, papers to write, etc. I hope this will smooth out some of the ups and downs of her first year of college.</p>
<p>Skype, international calling cards, cell phones and email. We really are in touch with her about as much as we need to be--and more than when she's off all summer being a camp counselor.</p>
<p>THE BAD: It's expensive. What costs more than four years' worth of college tuition? Five years' worth of college tuition. A gap year actually is less than the COA at a private college, but this program isn't very far off from the cost of a year at our state flagship for a state resident who lives on campus.</p>
<p>The return to college hasn't been trouble-free. Her college was happy to grant her a year's deferment so she could go on a gap year. They really do seem to like the idea of kids taking a year before they're freshmen. But now they're understandably preoccupied with the kids whom they've just admitted (and then wooed to attend this college instead of some other one); sometimes the handful of gap-year kids kind of disappear from this institution's radar screen. And there's a lot to be done for next fall: course selection and registration, housing, scheduling orientation, and placement testing, to name a few. Some of these things can be done online. That's OK when your kid has good Internet access, which ours hasn't always. So she and I have both had to noodge the university occasionally to remind them that she needs to be kept up to speed on tasks and deadlines. And there have been glitches. For instance, she completed some forms last year, before her deferment came through, that really need to be revised before 2012-13, but because they're shown as complete at her portal, she can't access them. Another example: her college determines housing priority by the date you pay your deposit. She paid her deposit in April 2011--before even the Early Decision kids--but somebody lost track of that information. Instead of first in line, they put her last. When I finally got in touch with the director of on-campus housing, he graciously fixed that very quickly. But it took me several triess to get to him. And I have to make the phone calls because I'm not calling internationally from seven time zones away. Occasionally when I call, there is some initial consternation on their part that my daughter's father is trying to handle her business for her, but that usually vanishes when I explain the situation. People are usually helpful; I just think we might have placed more calls to the university than the average family has. And these are the hassles that make me shudder at the thought of applying to college during a gap year.</p>
<p>She did go to an emergency room for an allergic reaction to peanuts while she was away. That was tense for us. But we all survived.</p>
<p>OVERALL ASSESSMENT: Totally worth it for this kid and this family. We've fallen a little bit out of love with the particular program she's on (It's small; you're probably not considering it for your teenager.), but if we had it to do again, we'd absolutely send her on a gap year.</p>
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