Literature Review #2: Young people's accounts of taking a Gap Year as a form of identity work in higher education.

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 Citation:

King, Andrew. “Minding the Gap? Young People’s Accounts of Taking a Gap Year as a Form of Identity Work in Higher Education.” Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, Taylor & Francis Group, 2011, pp. 341–57, doi:10.1080/13676261.2010.522563.

Summary:

This study consists of a series of interviews with people who took a gap year before entering university within the last 5 years. The goal of this study was to better understand how these people perceive the value of their gap year, with respect to their academic and professional careers. The author, Andrew King, is a professor in sociology at the University of Surrey who spent his doctoral research examining the young people's transition to adulthood, particularly in regards to the phenomenon of the gap year. The results of the study showed that most people who take a gap year believe they were able to achieve higher levels of emotional maturity and independence compared to their fellow peers who did not take a gap year, and that it significantly improved their employability. King describes this process as "identity work," where individuals cultivate a specific From this lens, gap years are described by King as a form of "identity work", where individuals spend time cultivating a specific identity from personal experiences to prepare them for some future task (such as succeeding in college and other professional environments).

King divides the identity work associated with gap years into two categories: a "life course distinction" and a "social distinction." The former encompasses the self-reported growth in emotional maturity and independence after taking a gap year, while the latter describes how students obtain cultural capital during their gap year. A key term used here is "positional conflict theory," which describes how "recent changes in the labour market have increased competition for graduate jobs between different sections of the middle classes." In order to gain an "edge" over other competitors, people have used gap years as a means of gaining the "communication skills and character traits favoured by graduate employers" (343). These insights are further expanded upon in the following quote: "(t)hird world travel experiences act as cultural capital, giving one something to display to peers ... a way to claim new friends" (343).

 

An important dimension to the gap year that King considers is how the usefulness of the traditional gap year is often restricted by class. Traveling abroad is typically very expensive, and data presented in this article has shown that the people who take a gap year before college are predominantly from middle-class white families. These skewed statistics could also be the fault of how "gap years" are classified, since many students from lower-income families may take a gap year to work, usually in the retail sector, in order to save money and cover the cost of rising tuition. People in this situation may be able to cultivate some sense of responsibility, but they often don't receive the cultural capital they would have gotten with a traditional gap year experience.

Value:

This research paper is a useful look into the foundational structure of the gap year, and what students typically expect out of the experience. The interviews presented showcased a lot of interesting anecdotes, especially this one line from Matt who claims that "every job interview I've been to when they've seen what I did in [Gap Year workplace]... they've been straight away 'you've got the job'" (352). It's a pretty bold claim, and certainly not universally applicable as many other participants were less impressed by the usefulness of their gap year. One person who was interviewed made the claim that "the 'value' he assigned to his Gap Year had changed, becoming less significant than subsequent work experience" (352). This claim seems to line up with another scholarly article I read by Parker, Philip D., et al. (2015), which suggested that more recently employers have placed less emphasis on "preuniversity experiences."

Regardless of how useful gap years are in some respects, there remains strong evidence that gap years foster important life skills and cultural currency that will affect them on their path towards social mobility or replication. However, gap years have historically remained inaccessible to non-middle class families, which supports my argument that gap years are one of the many mechanisms that contribute to the perpetuation of class stratification.