Why Today’s Generation of High Schoolers Need a Gap Year

Five Benefits of Taking a Gap Year Off Before College

Christianity Today magazine just posted a thought provoking article offering some rather discouraging statistics and trends toward Christian faith among Gen Z young people born between 1995 and 2015.

The article also describes five benefits of taking a "gap year" off after high school graduation and the start of a regular college career. Lastly the article describes one particular approach for filling the gap year by HoneyRock, the Outdoor Center for Leadership Development of Wheaton College, which has developed a faith-based gap year called Vanguard.

The five benefits offered by this program are:

• Students can explore questions of faith away from family and their home churches in a space where it’s safe to wrestle.
• – Gap years help students to take the time and space they need to connect with God and build healthy rhythms before college starts. 
• During a gap year program, students get to meet people from different generations with different beliefs.
• In gap year programs, students experience the power of Christian community, doing life together through thick and thin. 
• Gap years provide students with an intentional time to build a holistic vision for the future.

As the father of four daughters who are past Gen Z age, I can testify to the concern I had for their transition from high school to college even back in the 1980s and 90s. The distractions, temptations and outright professorial challenges to moral values and religious beliefs in many college settings are a lot to successfully navigate and they are far more of a challenge today.

To put it bluntly, Christian parents, you should take as much care as possible to discuss cooperatively and draw up ideas and plans to avoid at all costs, paying a huge amount of money to have your son or daughter ruined by college. Instead, your young person should be encouraged and surrounded by an environment that is supportive of the beliefs and moral values that you and he/she are in agreement with. If you and you son or daughter are not in agreement on major moral or spiritual issues, you may consider the gap year concept to try to iron out how to address them with non-parental input but reasonably similar views. 

It is important to find common ground between parent and emerging adult child. The stakes are high for both of you. 

The high schooler may not be as sure of his/her faith as you as parents hope they would be. They will need to find answers to some of life's biggest questions with less and less of your direct input.

Christianity Today Article

If you are the parent of a high schooler who will soon be confronting the transition from high school to college, I encourage you to read this article.

To some extent, it is a promotion of one (Christian) College's approach to easing the transition, at a significant additional cost to the main curriculum. Whether you pursue this approach or not, the information in the article is valuable to raise your awareness of the importance of considering the high stakes of this point in your family life.

Here is the link to the article:

Why Today’s Generation of High Schoolers Need a Gap Year