<p>Does your school have guidance counselors? You seem to be leaving this all very late.</p>
<p>I’m a fan of gap years, but I can’t see why you’d take one. Unless you don’t feel that you’re ready for college, or you want a breather, why? Like the other posters, I don’t think a gap year would improve your application.</p>
<p>OK, here’s the story: If you’re a prestige whore and want merit aid, you’re out of luck. The very top schools don’t offer merit aid. Why would they? They don’t need to in order to get the best students. If you want merit aid, you have to go down a bit. But then again, you’re in luck: there are plenty of small LACs that would offer you merit aid, and that would give you a great education that would get you into a top grad school if you worked hard. Then you’d have the prestigious graduate degree and no one would care that your undergraduate degree was from Hendrix or Rhodes instead of Harvard. (Hendrix and Rhodes just given for example; I know that they are good LACs, but I don’t know if they offer merit aid. But plenty of LACs do.)</p>
<p>So, prestige or merit aid, choose one.</p>