‘Gap yah’ snobbery has gone too far

You’re sprawled out semi-conscious in an (entirely legally) borrowed trolley with half a
can of Carling to your name. Freshers’ week is over and now you’ve had some time to think. Gazing down at the mysterious, growing puddle in your lap, a thought filters through your innebriated brain: was my gap year (pronounced _gap yah_) really worth it?

The fate of the gap year student is coming under threat. Right now, you’re looking like an endangered species. While the UCAS website can’t tell you how many students took a gap year, they can tell you how many deferred. The great 2011 bum’s rush of UCAS applications for pre-£9000 tuition fees meant a lot of prospective students chose not to defer a place. The numbers have more than halved from 6.9% to 3.3% in the 2011 to 2012 academic year – a fall from 33,426 to 16,299.

However, I’m not going to accuse David Willetts and other government members of sneaking into
teenage bedrooms and stealing STA brochures just yet. I don’t have enough evidence. Ultimately, it’s a personal choice, but I can appreciate why many chose not to take the
time off, and why it is important that the people who did felt their time was well spent.

Now, some of this might seem pointless in retrospect to people who know Michael J. Fox isn’t going to whisk them back to their 2010 UCAS application. But it’s important to remember how useful gap years are to various people before starting student life.

If you were someone who sat on your backside watching Jeremy Kyle exorcise entire council estates while stuffing cheetos (where did they go?) into your mouth, then chances are you didn’t make the most of your year out. You might have spent your year trying to find work experience in your ideal job – camped outside a newspaper’s headquarters, occasionally scraping
at the door and hoping they let you in through the cat flap. If you’re one of those lovely people who chose to volunteer in their time off then hopefully you’ve been through a life changing experience – meaning you arrive at university a completely different person to your sixth-form self.

If you’re like me then you worked a lot – if only to put some money behind you before all that crippling debt business and avoiding your bank statements like they’re Gorgons. Taking time off to work can sound depressing. Working somewhere where fried breakfasts cover your face in a foundation layer of grease every day also sounds depressing. However it’s probably the first chance you’ve had to step out of the education system for a bit, take a breather and see what it’s like to make your own money.

You might also get to use this money to fund your own travels – this could be anything from throwing up off the side of a party boat in Ibiza to On the Road. People I know have been lucky enough to take a two yah gap yah: working in the first and travelling for 6 months in the second. So while we’re all settling down to the stress of second year, they’ll be going Karl Pilkington on the world (if there ever was a time to be reassured that cannibal tribes still exist, then it’s now).

You may well bump into people around campus who have taken a year out – a windswept girl in the
union who spent her July fighting the forces of coastal erosion, perhaps. Or even someone with a face full of Maori tattoos and a tribal encounter to tell. Before you reach for your earplugs, what they did might not be as useless as you think. It might help you if you’re thinking about doing all this once your degree is over.

Gap Year success is hard to measure – it leaves people self-conscious about wasting a year of their life. If you made the effort, or just did the things you wanted to do, then no one can hold that against you – that in itself more than justifies it.