Having attended a private, faith-based college preparatory school from the second grade through the twelfth, I had grown to believe that as a matter of course I ought to submit to the wisdom of proceeding directly to a four-year college or university from whose precincts I should graduate after an unbroken four years of academic study so that I may proceed to the job of my choice to begin earning a living or proceed to graduate school for several more years. (You may breathe now. Pass “Go” and collect $200, please.) Most of my friends followed this pattern with little alteration. I, too, followed suit and enrolled the fall after graduation. As a high school student I did not have the sophistication to doubt whether this 4-by-4 pattern was merely conventional or tantamount to a sacrosanct rite of passage. But I did come to discover in my undergraduate years that I may have better served my path through university by taking some time away from school, away from what was familiar to me—Georgia, the South, the United States.
But don’t get me wrong. There are certainly positive points to proceeding directly to college from high school. The college counseling resources available at high schools are excellent, and would not be as accessible once one has left high school. Perhaps after studying hard for the four years of high school, one should immediately continue those studies at the university level so that the knowledge does not tarnish and the skills do not become dull. But is there another viable option? I ask only because I have often wondered whether I was ready for another four years of study right out of high school, not in an academic sense, but in a much broader sense, encompassing emotional maturity, self-knowledge, and life direction.
When I had the privilege to live and work in Haifa, Israel, for six months at a travel hostel, I became exposed to a European trend that had me wishing the United States had such a pattern. While I was balancing the books one night, counting the number of shekels against the number of guests who had signed in, I noticed that the majority of our overnight guests hailed from the U.K. and continental Europe and that most of them were between 18 and 23 years old. I thought it odd that so many college-aged folk were not in college. “Maybe it will change when the fall term begins,” I thought to myself. But the statistic never altered, not substantially.
So I asked a young Brit one morning while he was hanging his clothes to dry why so many his age traveled instead of attended university. He kind of chuckled out in a cockney accent, “Now, you wouldn’t want me to miss me own progress, would ya?” Or something to that effect, though I do remember the colloquial “me own” and that word progress. We might define a progress as a travel tour, an indefinite period wherein young adults who have passed their “O-Levels” (roughly equivalent to our AP exams) turn themselves out to the wide world and there let themselves … well, dry out, in a manner of speaking. Robert Frost might say, “Let the hay to make.” In other words, high school students have been so saturated with studies and arbitrary assessments and superficially constructed social schemes that by the time they graduate they are more than ready for a bit of life abroad to help cure (as in temper) the material of which they are made. Some of it will turn to dross and fall away; some of it will harden into precious metal that secondary education may shape and polish later.
But enough of the anecdotal proof. What can we learn from available statistics about American college students? Is there anything that suggests a lack of readiness to begin university right after high school? You may find the following statistics staggering. According to a study by the Department of Education, as many as 60% of American college students attend more than one school before they graduate with a Bachelor’s degree. The percentage of students who do not graduate from college is just as high. While it is a different issue from college transferal, dropping-out shares some of the same motivating factors. The Council for Aid to Education reports that less than 50% of U.S. college students entering four year colleges or universities actually graduate. Less than half!
Overall, upon graduating from high school (or actually before that), a student often doesn’t know enough about who he is, what he likes, or what his true interests are to enable him to make a wise choice about when and where to enter university or what to do with himself if he enters for no other reason than because it is simply “what everyone else does.”
Is it detrimental to transfer from one school to another? Of course not. Will taking a sabbatical guarantee that the student will then “know himself” enough to make wise choices and succeed? Not necessarily. But it is a pity that too few college freshman have ever left the confines of the United States before having to open yet another book on algebra or composition. Graduates ought to consider whether they are prepared to go to university. If not, they should take some time to get ready before going.