Gap Year

Colleges and Universities A-Z Georgetown University
1

I am an accepted student for the class of 2019 and am interested in taking a gap year next year, partly because I would like to travel/take a year off and partly because I would like to apply to more colleges. My question is whether or not Georgetown has a policy of refusing to allow gap year students to apply during their year off?

2

You can apply to other schools during your year off; you should just be aware that if you decide to matriculate at a different school, you will forfeit your deposit securing your place in the class.

3

@dzleprechaun do you know this to be true specifically at Georgetown?

4

@trollga123 I mean, I’ve never seen a policy saying exactly that… I rather doubt that something like that even exists, because you’d only need to explicitly define a rule if the policy weren’t already implied. What I wrote is really the only thing that makes sense, given all the other rules that exist. Specifically, we know the following things to do true:

  1. In order to take a gap year, you have to pay a deposit.
  2. When students fail to matriculate after paying a deposit, like if the get in off the waitlist somewhere, they lose their deposit, but that's it.
  3. When you fail to matriculate for whatever reason, you're not obligated to tell the school why you're not matriculating, so there's really no mechanism for Georgetown to know that you were applying elsewhere.
  4. Georgetown does not impose any restrictions of its own on applicants' ability to apply to other schools. It has no binding admissions policies. he only thing it stipulates is that students who are applying to another school's binding program (Early Decision or Single-Choice Early Action) should not also apply early to Georgetown - in other words, Georgetown only asks that you not violate a promise you already made to another school that you wouldn't apply anywhere else by applying to Georgetown.

Given all this, I think it’s pretty safe to assume there’s no prohibition on applying elsewhere while on a gap year. But if you’d like to confirm that, by all means, pick up the phone and call the admissions office.