Research Blog #6: Visual


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 identity work can help students stay on the college pathway towards social mobility/reproduction, and hopefully finish their bachelor's degree sooner than most students. From this perspective, a gap year could potentially save money in the long run, since you won't have to pay for another year's worth of tuition costs.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Literature Review #3: Academically adrift: limited learning on college campuses

Image
  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...
Read more

Research Blog #4: Research Proposal

  (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...
Read more

Initial Topic Ideas

Image
Mind the gap. The first two weeks of class have given me a lot of ideas for interesting topics to write about, but for right now I have two specific ideas I have been developing in my head. Topic 1: Gap Years, Dropping Out, and Transferring This is a topic I have a personal investment in, since I have experienced or have had people close to me experience these dramatic shifts in their academic trajectory within the past few years. I would like to explore the statistics for how many students go through with these options, for what reasons, and how it has affected their prospects afterwards. I expect this topic to intersect with topics of mental health and the anxiety that comes with going to college, which I intend to fully analyze. Ultimately, I want to answer the following questions: Why do students go down these paths, if they aren't forced to? How does going down these paths affect someone's future prospects and well-being? When would it be a good time to think about these o...
Read more