Abby Falik on Case Foundation blog advocating for bridge year

Cross-posted from the Case Foundation Blog

Headlines remind us daily of the challenges faced in our interconnected world.

The problems are enormous and complex – climate change, conflict, extreme poverty – and the consequences of not addressing them are shared. Yet few Americans have had personal experience with life beyond our borders. Only 10% of Americans speak a second language and fewer than 30% hold passports. Given these realities, how can we expect our country to address global problems when so few of us have seen the globe?

Here’s one answer, and it only takes a year…

A global “bridge year” is a year of structured international service between high school and college that gives young people the opportunity to understand another culture, learn a new language, and gain first-hand insights about the causes and consequences of global poverty. Its roots are found in the gap years that have traditionally taken youth from the UK and Australia around the world. Those roots have taken seed and been expanded to create substantive academic and practical learning components aligned with the preparation, knowledge, and skills that colleges and universities seek in their best applicants.

In his new book, Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times even went as far as advocating that universities make such experiences a requirement. Colleges and universities are increasingly in agreement. For decades, Harvard has encouraged its admitted students to take a year off before enrolling, and last year Princeton University instituted a program through which up to 10% of their incoming class will have the opportunity to engage in a year of international service before even setting foot on campus. And to sweeten the deal, Princeton picks up the tab.

Why the surge in high-profile interest? The benefits of a global bridge year couldn’t be more clear:

• The National Research Center for College and University Admissions estimates 50% of students switch majors at least once and take an average of 6.5 years to complete degrees at 4-year institutions. A global bridge year enables incoming college students to clarify their academic and professional interests and better focus their education.
• On an individual level, a global bridge year not only promotes greater confidence, independence, and maturity, but the experience can also foster sustained civic and philanthropic engagement in communities at home and around the world.
• On a societal level, employers are clamoring for high school and college graduates who are actually prepared for the rigors of 21st century jobs, and four million people between the ages of 16 and 24 are unemployed. Just as national service may help to ease unemployment, as John Bridgeland states, so too can international service equip the next generation with the knowledge, skills and experience needed to help America remain competitive in today’s global marketplace.

The initiative I lead, Global Citizen Year, is training a national corps of high school grads and supporting them in apprenticeships in Africa and Latin America during their bridge year before college. But our vision reaches far beyond our current program. Ultimately, we envision a world in which a global bridge year is the norm – not the exception – for young Americans. We envision a day when every graduating high school senior has the opportunity to spend a year before college living and working in a community in another part of the world. Only then can we ensure that the next generation of American leaders has a life-long commitment to service, the fluencies needed to communicate across languages and cultures, and the ability to provide innovative and effective leadership to address the most pressing issues of the 21st century.

The idea is simple, but the potential is revolutionary: the challenges we face are increasingly global, so let’s give emerging leaders the opportunity to experience the world during the formative transition to college, equipping them with a global perspective that they will carry throughout the rest of their lives.

Given today’s headlines, we can’t afford not to.

Tags: bridge year, case foundation, gap year

GCY in NYT: Kristof’s “Teach for the World”

In his Thursday column, “Teach for the World,” Nick Kristof plugged Global Citizen Year as he stressed the need for Americans to embed in other cultures, noting that it would have a profound impact on everything from our foreign policy to our stance on the environment.  Here is an excerpt:

“Fewer than 30 percent of Americans have passports, and only one-quarter can converse in a second language. And the place to learn languages isn’t an American classroom but in the streets of Quito or Dakar or Cairo.

Here’s a one-word language test to measure whether someone really knows a foreign country and culture: What’s the word for doorknob? People who have studied a language in a classroom rarely know the answer. But those who have been embedded in a country know. America would be a wiser country if we had more people who knew how to translate “doorknob.” I would bet that those people who know how to say doorknob in Farsi almost invariably oppose a military strike on Iran.

(Just so you don’t drop my column to get a dictionary: pomo de la puerta in some forms of Spanish; poignée de porte in French; and dash gireh ye dar in Farsi.)

American universities are belatedly recognizing how provincial they are and are trying to get more students abroad. Goucher College in Baltimore requires foreign study, and Princeton University has begun a program to help incoming students go abroad for a gap year before college.

The impact of time in the developing world is evident in the work of Abigail Falik, who was transformed by a summer in a Nicaraguan village when she was 16. As a Harvard Business School student two years ago, she won first place in a competition for the best plan for a “social enterprise.” Now she is the chief executive of the resulting nonprofit, Global Citizen Year, which gives high school graduates a gap year working in a developing country.

Global Citizen Year’s first class is in the field now, in Guatemala and Senegal, teaching English, computers, yoga, drama and other subjects. Ms. Falik is now accepting applications for the second class, and in another decade she hopes to have 10,000 students enrolled annually in Global Citizen Year.”

Tags: media, New York Times

Should my son or daughter take a bridge year?

The answer is most likely yes.

What is a bridge year?
A “bridge year,” sometimes referred to as a “gap year,” is a year between two phases of formal academic education, commonly the period between high school graduation and the beginning of college.  Global Citizen Year chooses to use the term “bridge year,” because we believe that a year of structured experiential learning will enable a student to more effectively bridge his or her high school and college experiences.

And, why?
Students who have taken a year “off”, enter college more mature, with new life experiences and perspectives that will make them better prepared to make the most of their college experience. At the same time, students are poised to contribute to their college community in new ways.  They enter school with renewed energy for academics and a clearer vision for how to focus during their time in college.

We’d recommend reading Gwyeth Smith’s article that ran recently in the Washington Post, in which he advocates for the majority of high school students to take a bridge year before college.  If you need more convincing, Harvard has recommended taking a bridge year to all of its students for the past 30 years.

Wondering if GCY might be a fit? Check out our selection criteria or meet some of our current Fellows.

How about the big concerns: safety and finances?  Take a look at our For Parents section, where we address these questions in detail.

Tags: parents

GCY 2010 Applicants Q & A

On May 3rd, Global Citizen Year will be hosting a live Q&A discussion for interested high school students and current applicants.  We will stream the conversation live from San Francisco on the blog using USTREAM.

Details:

• Time: Monday, May 3rd @ 5:00pm (PDT)/ 8:00pm (EDT)
• Location: URL
• Who: GCY Staff and Current Fellows that just arrived back in the Bay Area

Sign up below and stay tuned! › Continue reading

Tags: recruitment