College! College? College...

Notes: This is one of the visuals I plan to use for my oral presentation, and it is an important albeit circumstantial piece of evidence in support of taking a gap year. One of the main arguments against taking a gap year is the income you miss out on by delaying how long it takes to finish a bachelor's degree. However, this graph shows that in most colleges, students typically finish their four-year degrees in 5 or 6 years, rather than 4. There are many potential factors for why this is, but one of the core reasons behind this trend is that students enter college severely underprepared to finish on time. Students often don't commit to a major in their first year, and take more credits than they really need to graduate. Switching majors isn't uncommon among students, and in general many students fall behind in their major because they aren't prepared for the course load/curriculum.    Ideally, a gap year could alleviate some of these issues. Engaging in meaningful ident

  (This proposal is unchanged from the original draft, apologies for publishing this late) Sean Park Professor Michael Goeller Research in Disciplines: College! 19 February 2021 Research Proposal 1) Working Title Gap Years and Dropping Out: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Exacerbates Anxieties About Higher Education, Especially Among Lower Income Families 2) Topic Description One of the many side effects that came with the onset of the recent pandemic was the drastic drop in student enrollment in higher education. The early months of the stay-at-home orders were characterized by schools scrambling to transition to online learning, with varying degrees of success based on the preexisting infrastructure they had. Anxieties about the pandemic and changes to schools during this time have prompted many students to take a gap year or drop out entirely to seek out more meaningful experiences or careers. An article from the Wall Street Journal noted how many students took a leave of

  Originally published in 2011 Citation: Arum, Richard, and Josipa Roksa. Academically Adrift : Limited Learning on College Campuses . University of Chicago Press, 2011. Summary:  This book documents a longitudinal study conducted to determine how much college students' critical thinking skills improved from when they first entered college to the end of their sophomore year. Growth in critical thinking was determined using the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), which was considered one of the most sophisticated and well-developed performance evaluators at the time. The researchers, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, are both well-respected sociologists who specialize in education and how it affects social stratification. The study ultimately concluded that students generally showed very little signs of growth in critical thinking and writing skills during this time period, improving their skills, on average "by only 0.18 standard deviation" (35). What makes these re