Relentless virus pummeling state
Gap year: Facing remote learning, some students delaying college
Sadie Fleig eagerly anticipated her freshman year of college — moving away from home, embracing campus life, making new friends.
But this spring, as she witnessed the wild uncertainty of life in the age of coronavirus, she realized her vision might not match reality. Fleig, who graduated from Berkeley High School last month, decided to take a gap year rather than start at Colorado College, in 2020.
“I wanted to play the safest bet,” she said. “An inperson experience is incredibly crucial to my idea of college and what I want out of it. I thrive in communities and I want to kind of immerse myself in it, which is impossible online.”
That’s why Fleig will spend the fall working on a campaign to lower the voting age to 16, joining a friend doing yard work in the East Bay and taking an online Spanish class. She hopes to travel to New Zealand early next year and begin college in the fall of ’21.
Her plan illustrates an in
creasingly popular option for recent high school graduates amid the pandemic. Many students, wary of the virus forcing schools to pivot to distance learning, are choosing to delay the start of their college careers — even though the pandemic also has curtailed traditional gapyear adventures, such as international travel, and made jobs harder to land.
Ethan Knight, executive director of the Portlandbased Gap Year Association, estimated about 40,000 students in the U.S. typically take a gap year. Knight doesn’t yet know how much that number will change in 2020, but his group has seen a striking jump in traffic on its website — 421% more page views among users searching for gapyear programs in the past week, compared with the same period in 2019.
One of those programs, Pacific Discovery, also is fielding significantly more inquiries than usual. U.S. admissions director Austin Rogers finds herself perpetually on the phone, answering questions and interviewing prospective participants.
Rogers expects an increase of up to 50% for 202021, even if Pacific Discovery probably will cancel its international programs for the fall because of COVID19 restrictions. The company also is likely to trim its presence in the Western U.S. from nine states to four or five — but will run multiple programs in those locations to accommodate heightened interest.
“Now that universities are giving hard details, people are bailing,” Rogers said. “They’re jumping ship. … Nobody wants to have the spring repeated, going home midsemester.”
That scenario weighed heavily on the minds of Bay Area students who chose to take a gap year. Abby Hasselbrink of Danville was considering it anyway — and then the pandemic upended education in midMarch, abruptly pushing it online.
Hasselbrink finished her senior year at Holy NamesOakland with remote instruction and feared an encore for her freshman year at Denison University in Ohio.
“When I heard my school was doing preorientation online, that put me over the edge,” she said. “I really wanted to have everything in person. … I just thought taking a year to try something new and break away from school would be beneficial.”
Hasselbrink, much like Fleig, is dividing her gap year into two distinct segments. She will continue her parttime job at Baskin Robbins in San Ramon through the end of the year, along with doing volunteer work for the Democratic Party of Contra Costa County. (Most schools hold spots for admitted students who choose to take a gap year.)
Then, if the pandemic eases in the next sixplus months — by no means a certainty, as Hasselbrink acknowledged — she will leave Feb. 1 on a 10week trip to Central America, one of Pacific Discovery’s programs.
Kaycee McKenzie, a 2020 graduate of Cardinal NewmanSanta Rosa, will stay closer to home during her gap year. She endured a tumultuous run at Cardinal Newman — the Tubbs Fire destroyed half the campus during her sophomore year, forcing students to take classes in various parishes, and the pandemic derailed her final semester.
McKenzie originally planned to attend nearby Sonoma State, despite not getting into the school’s nursing program. She improvised by enrolling in a training program for medical assistants this summer in Rohnert Park — before the University of Portland admitted her off its waiting list, into the nursing program.
Even so, McKenzie and her parents didn’t want to spend the money on tuition, room and board — about $30,000 per year at Portland, she said — and potentially end up taking online classes at home in Santa Rosa. She ultimately deferred her acceptance to Portland and will complete the training program and try to land an internship and job during her gap year.
“I can’t see paying that much money and not being sure if you can stay or you’re going to have to come home,” McKenzie said.
One factor driving Bay Area students is their unsatisfying experience with remote instruction this past spring. McKenzie, who developed painful headaches while staring at the computer screen, struggled with motivation and came to realize she’s a handson learner.
Hasselbrink missed the structure of Holy Names and seeing her teachers in person, not on a computer screen. Oliver Backer, who went to HeadRoyce School in Oakland and will take a gap year before enrolling at Colgate, also was influenced by his unappetizing taste of distance learning.
“My high school experience definitely made me want to turn off my camera and mute myself rather than do the work,” Backer said.
Or, as Fleig described her final few months at Berkeley High: “It was incredibly frustrating and disappointing. You’ve worked 13 years on your education and you end up graduating on YouTube.”
This helped shape how Fleig and these other students made their gapyear decision. She feels fortunate, in a way, because this is a natural time for an academic break, between the end of high school and the start of college.
Fleig made the call before Colorado College, where tuition is about $60,000 annually, announced its fall plan. The school, for now, plans to stagger attendance in blocks of 34 weeks (starting with freshmen) — but she also knows many schools are quickly abandoning plans to reopen campus, given the recent surge of coronavirus cases.
So Fleig will happily stick with her gapyear plan, in an attempt to patiently outlast a global pandemic. McKenzie, the Cardinal Newman graduate, is taking the same approach.
“I was definitely looking forward to the social scene in college,” she said. “That’s why I’m willing to wait.”