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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.

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Everyone expects American high school graduates to go directly to college. At the same time, they are also expected to know exactly what they want to study. It’s an unrealistic expectation – we live in a big world with lots of challenges and there are tons of possibilities. Global Citizen Year is an opportunity to break that mold and do something different – go into the world before college, use your skills to make a difference, and enter college with a stronger sense of yourself, meaningful real world experience, and a global perspective.

If you have trouble viewing the video, click HD (high definition) Off on the right-hand side of the screen.

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On Monday, Nick Kristof was in Palo Alto as the keynote speaker for Castilleja School’s “Global Week”, where Global Citizen Year will present on Friday.  Kristof presented a message to the students that, in short, goes like this:

• You’ve all won the lottery of life in the US and the winning ticket comes with real obligations
• Helping people is hard – harder than it looks.
• Recommends spending enough time to get a “nitty gritty sense at the grass roots of how things really work”, “Outside your comfort zone”.  Makes people/issues real – in a way you’ll always remember.
• Don’t be daunted. Each person counts, like the old parable “There are thousands of starfish…every one counts”

Kristof’s new book, Half the Sky, addresses broader systemic issues as he outlines the failure of the American education system to adequately prepare young people to take on the tough challenges of our time.

“One of the great failings of the American education system, in our view, is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad. Study-abroad programs tend to consist of herds of students visiting Oxford or Florence or Paris. We believe that universities should make it a requirement that all graduates spend at least some time in the developing world, either by taking a ‘gap year’ or by studying abroad. If more Americans [did this]….our entire society would have a richer understanding of the world around us. And the rest of the world might also hold a more positive view of Americans”

And here, he voices support for international versions of already successful domestic service programs such as Teach For America.

“It would be useful if there were better mechanisms for people to donate time. The Peace Corps is a valuable program, but it requires and intimidating commitment of 27 months, and the schedule does not follow the academic year…Teach for America has generated enormous interest among public service-minded young people, but it is a domestic program. We need funding for Teach the World, an international version of Teach for America, to send young people abroad for a year…That would offer an important new channel of foreign assistance to support girls’ education in poor countries, and it would also offer young Americans a potentially life-changing encounter with the developing world.”

What if American universities actually made it a requirement for each student to spend time living in a developing country before college, as Kristoff suggests? Thousands of young people would enter college hungry for the resources to learn how to solves some of our generation’s most pressing challenges and equipped with a rich set of experiences to give context to what they learn.  Because – after all – truly helping people is often harder than it looks.

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“Ultimately, the gap year could put private consultants like me out of business.” – Gwyeth Smith, a celebrated college admissions consultant

Over the weekend an article by Gwyeth Smith, a legendary guidance counselor turned admissions consultant, ran in the Washington Post advocating for high school seniors to take time off before attending college.  Over the years Mr. Smith has seen student after student focus on GPA’s and SAT’s to get into the best colleges in the country and then plunge into pre-med or engineering only to find that 4 years later they don’t want to be a doctor or an engineer.  In addition, they have on average $23,200 of student loan debt, with many having much more!

As a private college consultant, Mr. Smith now says that he is advocating for a gap-year for a majority of the students he works with.  During their “13th year,” he says that students have the space to pursue their interests and learn more about what they might want to study before entering college.  This is a marked shift from earlier in his (4-decade) career when he only recommended a gap year to students who needed to mature:  “But in this wheezing economy, when jobs are precious and even state colleges are increasingly expensive, I have become a believer in the educational and financial benefits of taking a breather.”

Mr. Smith then goes further to push for a gap year that has clear learning objectives and some level of structure:

“The son of Reed President Colin Diver took a year to learn carpentry. H. Keith H. Brodie, a psychiatrist and president emeritus of Duke University, told me recently that he believes freshmen who delay college for a year tend to be more altruistic and empathetic because brain development continues into late adolescence. He advocates gapping so long as students have a mentor, a plan for intellectual growth and a commitment to do public service.”