Short Term Goal Vs Long Term Sacrifice?

We meet gappers, and gapper's families who are concerned that a break between high school and post secondary will produce negative results in the long run.

Short term sacrifice? Long term gain?   

Our fellow educators at the HEQCO have some interesting findings to share with you.


HEQCO

Students Who Delay Entering Postsecondary Education Not Hurt in Labour Market


An increasing number of students are delaying their entry into postsecondary education (PSE) and a new study by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) finds that delaying had no significant impact on the performance of graduates once they enter the labour market. The study found that students who delayed attending PSE fared just as well as direct entrants in most measures including unemployment rate, working in a job related to their field of study, being overqualified for their job and annual earnings.


However, delayers, especially those with a long delay, make different program choices than direct entrants. Delayers were more likely to attend college, and those who did go to university were more likely to enrol in liberal arts programs.


Project Description

Postsecondary Education Latecomers: Profile and Labour Market Outcomes of Ontario PSE Graduates uses data from Statistics Canada’s National Graduates Survey and Follow-up Survey of Graduates, complemented by data from Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey. The data include cohorts between 1982 and 2005. The study examines the demographic profile of delayed entrants, their program choices and their labour market performance. Delayers were separated into two categories, short delayers and long delayers, based upon their age at the time they obtained their first PSE credential.



Findings

In Ontario, delayers tended to be first-generation (graduates whose parents have no PSE) or Aboriginal, groups who are traditionally underrepresented in higher education. This was especially true of long delayers. In the cohort of 2005, 44% of long delayers were first-generation students, which is 20 percentage points higher than direct entrants. Also, the percentage of delayed entry graduates whose first language was neither English nor French grew from between 5-15% in the 1980s to 15-25% in the cohorts of 2000 and 2005.


Compared to their university counterparts, delayed entry college students’ choice of program was more diverse. Short delayers made program choices similar to direct entrants, while long delayers were more likely to study health, computers, architecture and engineering. They were also less likely to study education or physical and biological science programs.



While their overall labour market performance was not significantly different than direct entry graduates, the study did find that long delayers who graduate from college were more likely to be completely out of the labour force at five years after graduation.


Due to the growth in the number of students delaying entry to PSE and the province’s overall attainment goals, the author argues that delayers cannot be considered a marginal group in Ontario’s higher education system and should be of great interest to policy makers.


Postsecondary Education Latecomers: Profile and Labour Market Outcomes of Ontario PSE Graduates was written by Shuping Liu, Research Analyst for the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario.


For more information visit: http://www.heqco.ca/en-CA/Research/Research%20Publications/Pages/Summary.aspx?link=99

Mind the GAP

We were delighted to be part of  Maclean's 2013 Campus Series.   Below is a copy of the article.   We work 

with wonderful gappers and families.  It was so exciting to be able to share one of their stories through this
article.  Gap years continue to become a pathway after high school, as a break in post secondary or even after, as we see in this case.   We believe in gapping at any age or stage in life.   As far as we have come to know, we are the only gap year planning organization that combines coaching and EQ within a structured gap year.  We partner with many exceptional companies who support gap year experiences.   We look forward to continuing to serve gappers and their families in creating a year we hope you will not forget!

Mind the gap

By Rosemary Counter | February 13th, 2013 |

Gap years now happen before and after university

Mygapyear Cate M. India Nepal 2011.

University of Guelph undergrad Casey Panning, now 24, was sitting in a Southeast Asian geography class when it occurred to her that she might never see Asia. With vague plans to teach geography, and inspired by a friend who’d spent a semester in Singapore, Panning knew it was now or never.

The gap year—taking a year off school to work, travel or volunteer—has been a pre-university rite of passage in Europe, where it began in Britain in the ’60s and spread to other Commonwealth countries—including Canada. A Statistics Canada survey of about 8,500 high school graduates from 2000 to 2008 found that just 50 per cent had started college or university within the usual three months; 73 per cent had begun in a year’s time; and by 28 months after graduation, 81 per cent of students were attending a post-secondary school.

Some schools even encourage a break: York University’s Bridging the Gap program allows students to defer their acceptance; Harvard actually suggests it.

But while the gap year once fell definitively between high school and higher education, travelling the world at 17 or 18 just isn’t feasible for many people.

“First of all, my parents would have never let me,” says Panning, who finished a bacherlor’s in psychology before spending her gap year teaching English in Costa Rican slums and travelling with her boyfriend through Australia, Laos and Thailand. Besides parental objections and a lack of money (and fewer skills to land a job), more maturity makes a post-degree gap year easier and more rewarding than its post-high school equivalent. “It’s way better to get university done and then go,” Panning says.

Nobody tracks when or where college and university grads go after they receive diplomas or degrees, but Susan Griffith, a transplanted Canadian living in Cambridge, England, says the post-university or -college gap year is a trend that has emerged since she started publishing Taking a Gap Year in 1999. She says the later gap year is both practical—“you’ve already paid your tuition”—and situational. “It’s much more difficult to get a job right out of university these days.”

This is especially true for students who graduate from programs like English and philosophy; despite what they might have been told, a B.A. often isn’t enough. Instead of working at a menial job, travel—whether for work or volunteering or tourism—is a great way for students to beef up a resumé and set themselves apart from the competition.

“Gap years were once frowned upon by employers, as if kids would rather travel than focus on their careers,” says Katie Idle, director of Vancouver-based Study and Go Abroad, Canada’s largest travel fair. “But things are changing; the workplace is globalized. Now it’s a big asset if you’ve travelled, interacted with cultures and lived in a different country.”

Indeed, studies show gap years actually benefit students. The non-profit Canadian Council on Learning found students who took gap years—affectionately known as “gappers”—were eight per cent more likely to find employment upon return, possibly because of their extra work experience.

Conversely, a bad gap year can hurt your chances for success. “An unsuccessful gap year is when you get some terrible local job and never get around to doing anything,” says Griffith.

To avoid this, a slew of personalized gap-year planning companies are flooding the Canadian marketplace. Toronto-based My Gap Year, for example, offers “a unique combination of life coaching and travel,” says co-founder Julie Newton. Her current clients, about half of them doing a post-university gap year, have found themselves living in the Amazon jungle, working on a ranch in the Australian outback and hanging out with Tibetan monks.

“We start the program with coaching,” says Newton. “We ask, ‘What do you want out of this year? What are your goals? What’s important to you?’ ”

If travel isn’t possible or of no interest, a stay-at-home gap year can be equally good for boosting a lacklustre portfolio. “We had one student who wanted to go to film school, so we got her into an online writing course, she volunteered at the Toronto International Film Festival and worked at a Cineplex movie theatre,” says Newton. The student was soon accepted into the program she wanted.

Most important, a gap year removes students from the conveyor belt of academia to get some much-needed perspective and appreciation for what they have. “People learn that they live very privileged lives and not to take simple things—water from a tap, even—for granted,” says Griffith. For most, another year of education may not seem so bad.

Which is exactly what Casey Panning did when she returned to Toronto. Thoroughly convinced she wanted to teach, she enrolled in teacher’s college and graduated last June. But teaching jobs are scarce. “I’m working at a law firm for the time being,” she says. And if nothing in her field pops up soon, would she tap out and go travelling again? “I would absolutely love to,” she says.

all rights belong to the author and Maclean's http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2013/02/13/mind-the-gap/