College can wait, but finding your life purpose can’t

April can be a cruel month for high school seniors. Students and parents anxiously await college admissions decisions, feeling like their whole future is on the line.

But, where you go matters far less than how you approach it. Yes, admission to a famous school can open doors. But credentials alone can’t equip us to lead a purposeful life.

Class of 2022

Here’s my advice: Don’t send your child to college until they’re prepared to make the most of it.

College is the single biggest investment we make in a young person’s life. Four years at a flagship state school can now cost $100,000, and private colleges can run three to four times that figure. Many families are girding themselves for decades of debt.

And recent interest rate hikes will only make things worse. Yet the vast majority of students arrive unprepared to make the most of the experience.

The transition out of high school can be one of the most formative stages in life, but only if we encourage students to step off the achievement treadmill. High school has become a high-stakes game to get into college. We’re still teaching to tests that robots can literally pass, and admissions boards reward perfect records over exploration and conformity over creativity. Put simply, our schools are focused on the wrong things.

Societies have long recognized late adolescence as a prime developmental moment for formation experiences. It’s the period when a young person has the maturity to leave home but is still shaping their values and identity, the moment one shifts from riding shotgun to taking the wheel. Despite this, our culture still encourages kids to run harder and faster toward an elusive finish line, rather than take a step back to discover who they’re called to become.

For nearly two decades, I’ve been a leading advocate for a reinvented gap year – one that’s more accessible and purposeful than our traditional associations with the term.

The point isn’t to drop out or lose momentum; it’s to gather experiences and insights that inform everything that comes next.

Finding time to find yourself

Before setting foot on a college campus, students need to figure out who they want to be, what the world needs – and how they will reconcile the two. The most transformative years coax young adults outside their comfort zones, where they forge connections with people decidedly unlike their classmates in service of a broader aim. When approached in this way, rather than being a “gap,” this year can fill in the gaps left by our formal education.

Exhausted parents may well ask: Can we afford this “pause”? In my experience, we can’t afford not to. The best investment we can make – the one with the highest return in every sense – is to not send anyone to college before they know their “why.”

I can’t count the number of recent high school graduates who have joined Global Citizen Year, the nonprofit I founded and lead, “knowing” they wanted to become a doctor. Then they spend a year as an apprentice in a health clinic in Senegal and come back knowing, with conviction, that they don’t want to be a doctor – or perhaps they l do, but now it’s a considered choice.

Answering this question before signing onto the pre-med (or pre-anythig) track can save massive time and angst – not to mention, money. These kids aren’t just swept along, doing what they think is expected of them. They’re making informed, deliberate choices.

When I think about my aspirations for my own sons, who are now 5 and 7, I hope that they won’t go directly from high school to college as many of us did. Soon, no one will. And the result will be better for them, and better for the world.