An article published yesterday in Education Week provides conclusive evidence that bridge years improve student success and completion rates in college.

The article cites a Journal of Educational Psychology study in which 2,800 students who had taken gap years were interviewed in subsequent years. The report concluded that the majority of students who had taken a gap year “reported significantly higher motivation in college—in the form of ‘adaptive behavior’ such as planning, task management, and persistence—than did students who did not take a gap year.”

Additional research conducted by Karl Haigler and Rae Nelson – GCY Advisory Council members – found that 60% of returned bridge year students reported that their time between high school and college “had either inspired or confirmed their choice of career or academic major.”

Yesterday’s news coincides with the arrival our 33 newest Global Citizen Year fellows in California.   As an organization committed to monitoring and evaluation, GCY is developing tools to track the impact of our program on our Fellows’ trajectory in college and careers.

Over time, we look forward to contributing our findings to the growing body of research on the benefits of a structured “bridge year”.

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.”

“Why getting Americans out of the country will help save the world” was written by David Kroodsma and cross-posted from The Huffington Post.

Tell high school seniors about Global Citizen Year.

Few Americans get to venture beyond our own borders. A pitiful 10 percent of Americans speak a second language and fewer than 30 percent hold passports. U.S. students have the lowest geography scores in the developed world. How can we expect our country to address global problems when so few of us have seen the globe?

I am lucky. I spent two years traveling, mostly by bicycle, first crossing Latin America and then the United States. As I traveled, I used my journey to raise awareness of global warming by giving talks at schools and going to the media. But when I talked to U.S. citizens about the plight of subsistence farmers in Honduras or coastal dwellers in Venezuela, I often received stares of confusion. I was more frequently asked, “Where is that?” than, “What can I do?”

Last week I shared lunch with Wil Keenan, an employee at Global Citizen Year. Each year, Global Citizen Year selects a Corps of high school seniors, and supports them through apprenticeships in Asia, Africa and Latin America during a “bridge year” before college. Students spend this year in a Peace Corps-like service project in a developing nation.

It’s a brilliant idea. Traveling and living in abroad is the best way to understand another culture, learn a new language, and grapple with the consequences of global poverty.

About a dozen students, or “Fellows,” are participating in Global Citizen Year’s first year. The organization hopes to expand next year to 50 students and then continue to grow. High school seniors can apply for 2010-2011 by March 15th.

Reading over the blogs from this year’s students, I find myself inspired and deeply envious. These students are learning far more in their 19th year of life than I did during my freshmen year of college. Living with a family in a developing nation opens eyes in a way that classrooms never can.

Consider Gaya, who grew up in Hingham, MA and decided to postpone attending Princeton to take a Global Citizen Year. Gaya is living with a family in Senegal and volunteering at a local school where she teaches basic computer skills and provides support for classes that have one teacher for every 45 students. Gaya is also gaining a first hand understanding of Islam. She writes:

“The topic of interest for this monthly meeting was Islam, an extremely relevant topic here in Senegal, and one that I knew surprisingly very little about considering I am exposed to concrete manifestations of this religion every hour of every day here in Senegal. It’s fascinating to think about the ability of human beings to cultivate and spread faith…Every day, five times a day, the Muslims of Senegal are united in their thoughts, in silent contemplation of God. I thought about faith and doubt, about order and society, solidarity and unity. I thought about how big the world is…and if religious ideas and faith can cross borders, can span continents and can connect people of different ethnicities, nationalities and races, why not others?”

Michael, from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is spending the year living with a family in Guatemala and working at a social enterprise that sells products such as low cost water filters, fuel efficient stoves, and reading glasses. His most recent blog post describes his exploration of water distribution in his community:

“Have you ever thought about where your water comes from and how many people are involved in bringing it to your faucet? Don Omar is a pretty successful businessman in Santo Tomas; he owns a small farm and also owns a water delivery service…Recently, out of curiosity, I headed off with Don Omar in his water truck. We drove through the Municipalidad de Magdelana Milpas Altas, heading out one of the only roads leading toward the mountain…before we finally reached the colonia and we began delivering water house by house. Don Omar seems to be the perfect example of small scale entrepreneurship. He saw that communities desperately needed water and were willing to pay substantial amounts for it…[so] he created a business to [deliver] an essential service for a reasonable price. Never did I think I would learn so much from riding a water truck all day!”

In another excellent piece about environmental opinions, fellow Laura Keaton, who is staying with a family in the mountains of Guatemala, writes about her surprise when she found out that her host family is concerned about climate change.

When I returned to the United States after crossing Latin America, I was amazed by our relative wealth. Most people in the U.S. live on more than 50 dollars a day, a number that is many times the world’s average. This affluence didn’t make me feel guilty; it made me feel empowered. We have the resources to meet global challenges. If we choose, we can use this wealth to invest in clean energy and solve climate change. Likewise, we have the ability to address health crises and the challenges of poverty.

But if our citizens have never traveled or lived internationally, how can we expect our country to rise to these global challenges?

If you know a high school senior, tell them about Global Citizen Year. The application to become a 2010-2011 Fellow is now open.

(Cross-posted from the Current TV News Blog) Read on Current HERE

My first impression of Guatemala was that the place I was living in was not “rural” as I had expected because everything in the little town in which I live is concrete and cinder block. There’s an internet café, and buses thundering past all the time. Also one thing that struck me the very first night was that they’re much more tolerant of noise here– there was music blaring until at least 2 am that Saturday. But now I don’t even notice it, so I guess it’s just what they’re used to.

My house here is not really like my home in the US in many ways. Here, there’s no central air, so having a window or door that isn’t perfectly sealed doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. We have no washing machine, so we wash our clothes by hand and line dry them. The weirdest thing to me though, was that they have a TV (with cable, so lucky) and a TV watching area, but no comfy couch to lounge on while watching. They just have plastic chairs. By now though I don’t even notice these physical differences, I consider my house here to be very comfortable.

So that’s my “house”, but my “home” here, my family and the daily activities of the household, is very much like my home in the US, if not more functional. My host-mom is a housewife, and she makes three meals a day for me and the rest of the family, we always have dinner together at 7. She is so thoughtful and has said things to me that my own mother would have. My host-father drives a water truck to fill people’s water tanks and also has land where he grows leeks (which we’ve had in meals and are very good. They get trucked to the US for sale apparently.) I have three brothers who are all in college including one for a business degree, and one who wants to become a heart surgeon. The youngest is 16, the oldest 23, and none of them are married because they want to get good jobs first. I see that as a kind of rare thing here, but I really think its good. They go to church all the time and are always visiting their family who live close by.

In the town I work in, Pastores, one huge problem I see is deforestation. The hills are all but bare of trees, because the public is uneducated about the dangers of deforestation–even though several years ago a tropical storm dumped enough rain on the area to cause a devastating mudslide of the eroded soil. The mothers chop down trees for firewood because it’s their only source of fuel.

In the town I live in, Santo Tomas, Pastores, and Guatemala in general, I see a huge lack of diversification in businesses. In Pastores, there are 8 boot stores in a row on two sides of the street. Every corner Tienda sells exactly the same products, and they are located within feet of each other. It boggles me how anyone can make any money that way!

Clearly deforestation is a factor of global warming. It’s not to say that they don’t care about the environment, for example the “alcalde” or governor of Pastores considers deforestation to be a big issue in the area soit’s not totally unnoticed, but their priorities are just a little different. You can’t live unless you have firewood to cook your food, it’s that simple. But there are more sustainable ways to do it, and that’s what they don’t know about. As far as the lack of diversification goes, I don’t know what global issue that’s indicative of. I know it’s indicative of the relatively poor education system here, and I don’t think it makes for a very strong economy either…

The economy of Guatemala is hugely dependent on that of the US. Just focusing on the aid organizations who function here mainly through donation based funding, they are now seriously struggling, which is a sad thing for the Guatemala when aid organizations who were doing really excellent and empowering work, as was the Reicken Foundation. This foundation was funded by one donor who essentially pulled his funding due to the economic down turn. The Reicken Foundation’s work consisted of creating community libraries and simple community spaces for the people to use a resource in personal and education development. (Guatemala has very few libraries, and of the ones it does have, most are not lending-libraries.) Now the scope and expansion opportunities of their work are much more limited. Just in general, the economic downturn in the US and the world at large have decreased revenues in Guatemala because people aren’t travelling or spending as much. This money really means a lot to the Guatemalan government because most people don’t generally pay taxes so a big chunk of their funding comes from tourism.

As to how what’s going on here affects the US, the most striking thing to me is I guess kind of an inconsequential thing. I have spent a lot of time here visiting my host-family’s family members and lot of them have farms (even my host dad has a small farm) and most of them sell these vegetables in the US. First of all, I don’t think I’ve ever seen lettuce actually growing in the ground before, or eaten oranges straight off the tree– but I’ve never ever gone hungry. And it seems as though it’s very possible that these were the people growing the food that fed me. Maybe that’s a big stretch, but I just never thought of my food as coming from somewhere other than American soil. Which is so silly.

Oh and another more personal example of how the US connects to Guatemala is through clothes. My host-mom runs a “paca” or a store that sells American clothes out of our house. She goes into Guatemala City to buy huge bags of shoes, and clothes that have been cast-off by the American fashion forward. It’s basically a grab-bag system, you don’t really pick what you buy, you just buy a huge bag and you get what you get. As a person who has always donated my unwanted clothes to GoodWill or something, rather than just throwing them away, I now see where it’s possible that a lot of them have ended up. At the supply store in Guatemala City I saw bags of toys that included a Hannah Montana sing-a-long guitar, and I truly wondered where it came from– who had bought it and for whom, and how quickly they must have tired of it, since Hannah Montana is still pretty big (I think.). But really, isn’t it kind of amazing to think that the Christmas sweater you wore once, and hated, and then gave away, might now be proudly worn by a child in Guatemala? It doesn’t just disappear– it all goes somewhere.

Andrew Fitzgerald, of Current TV, recently launched a blog series highlighting reflections from GCY Fellows on their experiences living and working in Guatemala and Senegal.

An except from Andrew’s first post:

What did you do between high school and college? Work at the mall for the summer? Try to read all of your college books ahead of time? Play your videogames in the air conditioning? Or instead did you go to a developing country and lend your hands and your mind in an unparalleled experience in service and leadership? Yeah I didn’t do that either. But eleven Class of 2009 grads have, embarking on the pilot of Global Citizen Year.

Global Citizen Year is a fellowship program that invites high school seniors to take a “bridge year” before starting college and to serve overseas. From their site: “By providing intensive training and support, we ensure that our Fellows develop an ethic of service, the ability to communicate across languages and cultures, and a deep commitment to becoming agents for social change.” I think this is a really powerful idea. So few Americans travel, and even fewer ever develop a second language, and a program like this can provide a really incredible perspective.

Global Citizen Year (GCY) is just starting up this year and its first round of fellows have recently embarked for Guatemala and Senegal. I had the good fortune to speak with them before they left about documenting their experiences abroad. I invited them to share some of their experiences with us here to the Current News Blog and we’ve got some of their responses back already. I’ll be highlighting them this week: starting with Alec Yeh, Ian Zimmerman and Laura Keaton.

Here is a link to the original invitation to the Fellows from Andrew.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy — author of the critically acclaimed book, The College Solution, and contributor to BusinessWeek, USA Today, Money Magazine, and The New York Times — suggests in her recent article “Want to get into Harvard? Take the year off,” that a gap year may be one way to help students get into elite schools, and then perform better once at those schools.

“A student, who was rejected by Grinnell College, spent the year teaching English abroad and received good news the next time she applied to the elite liberal arts college. A student, who got into Duke after experiencing a gap year, ended up becoming a Rhodes Scholar.”

Check out Lynn O’Shaughnessy’s argument for the benefits of getting out into the world before college

“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.”

“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.”

GCY Fellow Gaya Morris will be hosting a booth at the Hingham, MA, Farmer’s Market on Saturday September 5th from 10 am to 2 pm. Gaya is commissioning portraits from family, friends and community members as part of a series that she will continue to produce throughout her GCY experience in Senegal. Read more about Gaya’s project on her blog: www.globalcitizenyear.org/category/fellows/

Why the farmer’s market? In Gaya’s own words, “I think it would be … inspiring for people to see that an average high school student living in their community, just down the road from the public library, is able to embark on such an adventure. GCY is about more than just giving to and raising awareness about the developing world – it’s also about giving its students the tools with which to make change – any place, for any community, anywhere. The Farmer’s Market is for me such an exciting place as I think it represents a community movement towards change … I really think my experience (and the GCY mission in general) is about influencing and involving home communities just as much as foreign ones.”

Find Gaya on Saturday September 5th, 10 am – 2 pm at The Beach Market, Hingham Bathing Beach, on Route 3A in Hingham, MA.

According to an article recently published in the Christian Science Monitor, colleges are increasingly encouraging — and rewarding — students who choose to take a bridge year before college. “Colleges are thinking creatively these days about linking two priorities for students: financial aid and public service…what’s catching on now is the idea of rewarding up front students who defer college to help others.”

The bridge year concept is gaining traction!

Read the original article.

Read the New York Times commentary.