Gap Year Research Consortium at Colorado College

Anyone who has taken a gap year or is somehow connected to the gap year community is familiar with the myriad benefits of doing so. Students who take a gap year between high school and college are almost invariably more mature, more focused, and more likely to take advantage of the full undergraduate experience from the start of their first year. It has also almost become conventional wisdom that doing something different for a semester or a year can be liberating from the lock-step mentality with which most students approach their high school experience. A gap year can help students discover for themselves where their true talents and passions lie. For that reason, ideally students complete the college admissions process before taking a gap year. That way, the admissions process is behind them and they can focus on what’s truly important to them.

Up to now, the evidence for these benefits of taking a gap year has been compelling but largely anecdotal, and the growth of interest in taking a gap year has been largely dependent upon word-of-mouth. However, as colleges and universities have come to recognize for themselves that students who have taken a gap year bring even more to their educational and other endeavors in college, a few institutions began studying the effects of taking a gap year with their own research projects. Middlebury College (VT) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were among the first to do so, looking at the undergraduate academic performance of gap year students.  A few other institutions did their own gap year-related research on other topics, comparing graduation rates of gap year students to others, and even looking at disciplinary rates of gap year students compared to others. However, these projects were largely undertaken in their own institutional vacuums, with little attempt to disseminate their research outcomes to the broader educational community and the public.

Thus was born the Gap Year Research Consortium at Colorado College (GYRC) in 2019. The Consortium is a group of colleges and universities around the United States interested in encouraging more gap year research and creating a clearinghouse to share gap year research methodologies, data, and outcomes and eventually distributing this information widely through journal articles and the public press.  At this point the GYRC has 12 member institutions: Bennington, Case Western, Colorado College, Denison, Duke, Florida State, Harvard, Lafayette, the University of Oregon, Portland State (OR), Stanford, and Tufts. Colorado College provides a Principal Investigator from its faculty and a Coordinator to oversee the Consortium’s research projects, and the Consortium has a seven-member Advisory Board comprised of experts in educational research and others interested in the gap year movement. The Consortium also has its own website at Colorado College here.