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CASE STUDY

If at First They Don't Succeed.....

Students use an increasingly popular 'gap year' strategy to increase their chances of being admitted to elite institutions. When the letters from colleges arrived in Matthew Savage Aibel's mailbox in the spring of 2004, he was not thrilled with the news. Despite his 1420 SAT score and good grades, the most-competitive colleges to which he had applied, including Georgetown University and Yale University, rejected him. Hamilton College, a selective college that accepts only about a third of its applicants, admitted him, but Mr. Aibel thought he could do better. He deferred at Hamilton and took a year off.

Most applicants who aim high end up settling for a college somewhere down the food chain. Competition for slots at Ivy League-caliber institutions has been ratcheting up for years, driven in part by a growing pool of high-school graduates. This year Harvard University admitted a record-low 9.1 percent of undergraduate applicants; Princeton, Stanford, and Yale Universities each admitted fewer than one in eight applicants. But Mr. Aibel, who graduated in 2004 from Milton Academy, a private school in Milton, Mass., refused to settle for a "safety school." At the urging of a private-college counselor, Bob Gilpin, of Time Out Associates in Milton, Mr. Aibel took a "gap year" to study at Oxford Tutorial College, in England. The hope was that if Mr. Aibel did well in the one-on-one workshops there, those marks - coupled with his strong senior-year grades (nearly all As) - would bury the Bs he earned as a junior, helping him win a place at a more prestigious college in the United States. "I felt like I was in a good school," he says of Hamilton, "and that I had a shot at getting into an even better school."

Mr. Aibel is among a small but growing number of students who continue to pursue slots at highly selective colleges after striking out the first time. While some admissions deans believe that a handful of applicants are using unethical strategies to achieve their dream, gap years pay off for dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of students like Mr. Aibel each year. The gap-year strategy is most common among students from affluent families. As one college counselor says, "Prep-school kids who thought it was their birthright to get into a Harvard, Yale, or Princeton are ending up at Muhlenberg, and their parents can't get their heads around it" .

For students like Mr. Aibel, postponing college for a year is a small sacrifice to make for a second crack at a more prestigious institution. They believe that even a modest improvement in their résumés will make them more attractive to elite colleges. The trend is being fueled by a realization among some high-school counselors that many selective colleges are accepting a far smaller proportion of transfer students than of freshman applicants. (At Swarthmore College, for example, relatively few students drop out, and therefore in the past several years, the college has admitted as few as 4 and as many as 20 transfer students per year, out of an average applicant pool of 150.) Mr. Gilpin says a gap-year applicant is likely to get a closer look in the freshman-admissions process if only because essays from high-school seniors can all begin to seem the same to deans. "You're likely to have your application seen in a different way," he says. "You've singled yourself out, and that's a good thing."

For Mr. Aibel, the strategy worked - eventually. He applied early decision (in which a college gives an early answer to students who agree to enroll if admitted) to Cornell University during his gap year, but did not get in. In a second round of early decision, he applied to Washington University in St. Louis, and the deadline was late enough to allow him to submit his first-semester grades from Oxford Tutorial College, where he had earned all As. Washington, which recently tied for 11th place in the influential rankings of U.S. News &World Report (above two Ivy League institutions, Brown University and Cornell), offered Mr. Aibel admission. "I'd definitely say it worked really well," Mr. Aibel says of his gap year, "and I'd advise most people to consider it."

Amanda Lo Iacono attended Rye Country Day School, in Rye, N.Y., where she earned As and Bs. In the spring of 2003, she was admitted to Bucknell University and George Washington University and was put on the waiting list at Colgate University, Dartmouth College, and Washington University. She wanted to be an art-history major, and she did not view the art-history programs at Bucknell or George Washington as particularly strong, so she told both colleges that she would not be coming. "I didn't see the point of going somewhere I wasn't going to be happy just to spend my entire freshman year scrambling to get grades to try and transfer somewhere else," says Ms. Lo Iacono. Advised by the Center for Interim Programs, a company in Princeton, N.J., that specializes in mapping out gap-year plans, Ms. Lo Iacono began to see the possibilities of reapplying. The second time around, colleges would see her strong performance on the four Advanced Placement exams she took in May of her senior year. She would have a chance to take the SAT again. And she would attend Oxford Tutorial College - the same program that Mr. Aibel attended a year later - where she could take classes related to her interest in art history, to show colleges that she was committed to the field.

The script worked perfectly. Ms. Lo Iacono improved her SAT score by 50 points, to 1430. She earned As in her three tutorial courses - on ancient Greek history, modern British literature, and "Art in the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic". In the spring of 2004, she had no shortage of options - Oxford University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor all offered her admission. She chose Oxford, where she will be able to complete her undergraduate degree in just three years, putting her back on pace with her high-school classmates who went straight to college. Ms. Lo Iacono says her story is not unusual. The three other American students in her Oxford Tutorial program had similar successes. One student who got into Trinity College, in Connecticut, during high school ended up at Cornell. Another, who had been admitted to the College of the Holy Cross, was accepted at New York University the following year. A third, who had not been admitted to any of the colleges to which he applied during high school, was admitted to Trinity after his gap year. Meanwhile, three of Ms. Lo Iacono's friends from high school who started out at other colleges were unsuccessful in their attempts to transfer into Boston College, Colby College, and Georgetown University, respectively. "If you're not happy with where you get in the first time around, you should always take the gap year," says Ms. Lo Iacono.

With thanks to The Chronicle of Higher Education for permission to reproduce these extracts.

To see the complete article, please go to
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i48/48a03001.htm