 Should you take a gap year before college? That's what we're gonna be talking about today, but before we get into that, make sure to gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. On this channel, we talk about personal finance, college degrees, careers, and opportunities that are gonna lead you to success. And we also talk about avoiding some of the common traps that so many people fall for. Now if you're new here, welcome, and if you haven't done it already, go ahead, hit the subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you never miss an opportunity. Now with that out of the way, let's jump right into it. Let's talk about gap years before college and if you should take one or not. So this is a subject that you've probably heard of before pretty much everybody talks about it to the point where it's gotten a little bit annoying. I'm on my gut peel. So the question that we all ask ourselves when we're graduating high school is what the heck am I gonna do with my life? What the fuck are you doing? A lot of people don't know the answer to this question. After all, you're only like a 17 year old or an 18 year old, and so what they do is they take a gap year. Now in this video, I'm gonna talk about some of the reasons that you should take a gap year and I'm also gonna talk about some of the reasons that you shouldn't. Now the first thing on the list that you wanna think about is if you take a gap year, it will be a great opportunity for you to get some real life experience. A lot of the time during high school, people either don't work a job or they do work a job, but it's basically like a cashier job and it's only part time. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's great that you work that kind of job, but it might also be a good idea for you to get a full time job and work 40 hours a week just so you can see what the real world is like. Not only will you get some entry level experience, which looks great on your resume later on when you're trying to apply to jobs, but at the same time, you'll also get a realistic idea of what a good job looks like and what a bad job looks like. A lot of the time, these entry level positions aren't gonna be that great, but it's a good thing because in the future, when you actually do have a good job, you're gonna actually appreciate it. To be honest with you, I recommend that pretty much everybody work at least one crappy job in their lifetime. Usually this is going to be a service related job because I think it kinda just makes you a better person in general. If you've had a service related job, you're probably gonna be much nicer to people who work in service related jobs because you know how stressful and hard it can be to deal with people in the public. And even if you don't get a job, there's a lot of organizations out there that will help you to volunteer during your gap year. So at the very least, you'll get some volunteering working experience which isn't exactly the same, but it can still be really good on a resume. Now the second big thing is you're going to have time to find out what you wanna do with your life. Now most people, when they're 17 or 18, they might have kind of a general idea of the direction that they wanna go, but chances are they don't really know what they wanna do with their life. Seriously, what the fuck are you doing? A lot of people on their gap year, they're gonna either work for a company or sometimes they're gonna travel around and just see different parts of the world. And so they're gonna get a much better idea of what they wanna do with their life. For the first time in their life, instead of being in a very structured environment where you're at school and you're basically just doing whatever the teacher tells you to do, you're gonna have complete freedom and you're gonna be able to go anywhere you want and do pretty much whatever you want. Now according to data by the Gap Year Association, and yes, there is an association called the Gap Year Association. Wow! They took a survey of everyone who participated in a gap year with their organization and they said that 84% of the people who took a gap year learned skills while they were traveling abroad that helped them in their work. 77% of people said that the gap year helped them find their purpose in life. 75% said that it helped them get a job and 73% reported that it helped them prepare for college. Now, most of us are probably starting off with a net worth of zero at 17 or 18 years old. So you'd probably be surprised to know that your average 30-year-old actually has a lower net worth than your average 18-year-old. That's right, the average net worth of Americans is generally in the negative until somebody is in their 30s. So you can enjoy having a positive or zero net worth while you can. And it'll also give you time to think about whether it's worth it to go $40,000 in debt in order to get a college degree. And the first step to getting out of debt is of course, gently tapping the like button on my videos if you haven't done it already. Seriously, what the fuck are you doing? Okay, lady, I get it, you can stop now. Number three on the list, and this is a really big one that you probably don't even realize how important this is, and that is you get to travel and get outside of your comfort zone. Now, if you think about it, the ability to travel anywhere in the world is actually really unique. This has only been possible for the last maybe 100 years or so. And 100 years ago, it would have been a lot harder to do it than it is now. Almost nobody in all of human history had the ability to travel all over the world and experience different cultures. And you can go anywhere you want in the world, or at least you used to be able to before quarantine. Now, many people graduate high school and then they go right into college, and then right after college, they're gonna start their careers immediately after graduation. So most people between school and work, they don't have a chance to see the world while they're young. Now, I have to say this one is one of my personal biggest regrets. I actually didn't even leave the United States until just a few years ago. I've traveled all over the United States. I've probably been through like 20 different states, but I never actually left the US until very recently. Now, I remember I talked to my great aunt, who I have a lot of respect for. She's in her 80s and she's just a very wise person. I always ask her for advice. And she told me one of the most important things that I have to do immediately when she found out that I hadn't really traveled is I need to go and travel around the world. Now, of course, she gave me this advice right before all of this stuff, this crazy stuff that happened. So I haven't really been able to do it, but that is in my near future. When I was younger, I was honestly too poor to afford to travel anywhere. So I just kind of decided that it wasn't worth it. And I pretended like it wasn't something I was going to enjoy. But the little bit of traveling that I've done since then has been amazing. Every single time I do it, I really enjoy it. And so I plan to do it quite a bit more in the future. Traveling to different countries, seeing different cultures is gonna give you so much respect. It's gonna give you a different perspective about how the world actually is. It's gonna make you realize that some of the problems that you have in your life honestly aren't that bad. And I think when it comes to traveling, you know, you have to use the word priceless. You can't really put a price tag on that. Number four on the list, and this was really interesting when I read it, is that you will likely do better in college and you'll also be more satisfied. Now again, the Gap Year Association did a bunch of different studies and apparently students who went on their gap year had hired GPAs when they went to college. On top of that, after graduating from college, they reported that they had higher job satisfaction. And in short, they said, taking the time to figure out what success looks like is a surefire way to be much more likely to achieve it. Number five on the list is that you will likely feel much less rushed into choosing a major. This is one of the most common things that I hear about on this channel. People are very uncertain about their major choice and uncertainty creates a lot of anxiety and frustration, but if you're not sure what major you want to go for or even if you want to go to college in the first place and you take a year off, you're going to have plenty of time to reflect on this. You're going to be thinking about things from a different perspective. And honestly, high school isn't anything like the real world. It could not be any more different than the real world. You're basically in a bubble when you're in high school. I'm some kind of bubble boy. And college is kind of the same way to some extent. It's definitely different from high school. You have a little bit more responsibility and freedom, but it's still nothing like the real world. Now, quite a few of my viewers probably have parents and families that want you to either become a doctor or a lawyer, and if you become anything else, then you're a failure. Then others that watch my videos might have parents that give you the cookie cutter advice of do what you're passionate about, do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life. Now, these two pieces of advice are pretty much opposite, but they're both equally bad in my opinion. After all, if you ask the average 17-year-old boy what they want to do with the rest of their life for a career, they'd probably say that they want to play video games and eat Cheetos for a living. The truth is, almost nobody knows what they want to do with their life until they get out there and get some actual real-world experience, and that's why almost 80% of people who go to college change their major at least once. And on average, students end up changing their major three times throughout the course of their college career. This is also why schools like Harvard, for instance, actually encourage students to take a gap year, so if you get accepted to Harvard, they will give you the option of taking a gap year and then entering the next class after that. They believe that it helps students excel and find their purpose and overall be better students and workers. And the data, as I mentioned before, does seem to back that up. Number six on the list is that college isn't necessarily for everyone. I've talked about this before on the channel, but getting a college degree used to be just a sure-fire golden ticket to success. It used to be that you could basically get any degree it really didn't matter what the degree was and you were gonna be good to go. You were definitely gonna get a really good job. Those that have been following my channel know that this is not true anymore. There are many degrees out there that are basically traps. You could even almost call them scams. And let's say that you want to be an artist, for instance, you wanna be a professional photographer, you probably don't wanna go to college for that. I always like to say this. I believe that anything can be learned, but not everything can be taught. College is really good for learning certain types of information, but there are a lot of careers out there that there's no way you're gonna be able to learn something in a classroom or from a book. The only way you're gonna be able to learn it is to just go and do it, just do it. It's almost like riding a bike. You could read every book in the world on riding a bike. You could hire Lance Armstrong to coach you up on how to ride a bike, but until you actually try to ride the bike itself, you're probably not gonna be able to do it. And there are many other ways that you can make a living. Trades, careers, freelancing, entrepreneurship, becoming a YouTuber. A college degree, generally speaking, is a good investment if you look at the numbers. However, because of the amount of debt that you have to go into, there are a lot of college degrees out there that aren't as good of an investment. And a lot of the careers that you would be going for, you actually don't even need to get a college degree in the first place or you don't need to get that exact college degree in order to get into the career. So if you know exactly what you wanna do with your life, like let's say we use that example again and you want to be a professional photographer and you know absolutely that's what you wanna do with your life, then it really doesn't make that much sense to get a college degree. You would probably be much better served spending that amount of time, let's say, four years to get a bachelor's degree, for instance, just going out into the field and working yourself, creating your own business. You would get four years of real life experience taking pictures of people at weddings or whatever you decide to do, versus four years of kind of theoretical experience in college. Plus, after you graduate from college, you'd probably have about $40,000 in debt, versus let's say you made like $20,000, $30,000 a year, you'd have much more money doing it the other way. You probably wouldn't be in debt at all. But for the parents that are watching this that are afraid if their kids do a gap year, they decide to not go to college, there is some good news out there for you and that's the next one on the list, which is you will most likely still go to college. That's one of the common fears that people have is that for some reason, they'll decide to either not go to college, or a lot of the time parents will be afraid if their kids take a gap year that they'll just decide, hey, college isn't for me. But according to data from the Gap Year Foundation again, over 90% of students who take a gap year do actually end up going to college. So the vast majority of them still end up going to college, but they have a much better idea than mind of what they want to do. Now number eight on the list is a little bit meta, but it's learning about yourself. And this can be kind of hard to explain, but a lot of the time when you're 17 or 18, you don't even know what you like. Like you don't even know what you enjoy. So of course you're not gonna be able to select a really good career for you because you don't even know what you like doing because you just haven't done that many things. Taking a gap year will allow you to try a bunch of different things out so you can figure out what you like and what your personality is. Do you like traveling a lot? Do you like being around other people? Would you rather kind of be alone? These are all things that are gonna really help you decide what a good future career for you would be. It's gonna help you to become more purposeful as well. A lot of people kind of just go to college just because of the fact that everybody else is doing it as well. By taking a gap year, you're kind of taking the reins on your life. You're taking control and you're making a decision that is different than what most people are doing. You're not doing what everybody else is doing and you're stopping in order to think for yourself. You're also gonna be creating a very meaningful experience at a young age. A lot of the time people will end up traveling like way later on in their life and unfortunately many times they won't be able to travel like they could have when they were younger. And I think the biggest thing here is figuring out what you personally like. So not what your friends like or not what your parents like, not what society says that you should like, what you actually enjoy. Now the next thing, number nine on the list, I sort of touched on this already but basically it will really help you to build real life skills. Now I separate getting job experience from learning skills because I think those are two separate things. However, if you get job experience you'll also probably learn really valuable skills. But the truth is I think college is extremely valuable. Getting an education is extremely valuable. I'm not saying that it isn't but a lot of the time college is gonna teach you really theoretical skills that aren't that practical. By traveling and maybe getting a job or volunteering and just seeing the world in general you're gonna develop some practical skills that are actually gonna help you later on in life. And it doesn't matter whether it comes to getting a job, starting a business, maybe even starting a family, you're gonna build some of those real life skills that are so important. Now number 10 on the list is that you don't need to take a gap year. It isn't for everyone. First of all, you're probably gonna have a few months off in between your senior year of high school and when you start college. So you can absolutely go traveling during that time. So it's not like you can't ever go traveling. You won't be able to travel as much. You probably won't be able to stay in places as long but you can still definitely travel. On top of that, during college you can actually do programs like travel abroad where you can spend a semester in like France or Spain or something like that. So there are definitely other options out there for you getting to travel to different places. You can also start working on skills and get job experience while you're going to college. There definitely is a little bit of a feeling out process when you first start college and some majors are gonna be harder than others but most people are gonna have time to get a part-time job during college and they're also gonna have time to explore different skills and build their own personal skills. Now, if you already have a really good idea of what you want to do, maybe you've been following this YouTube channel for a while and you've done all the steps that I recommend to you in order to figure out what college degree and what career you wanna go into then that also takes away the need to take a gap year in order to figure out what you wanna do with your life. To be honest with you, I was kind of in this position when I came out of high school. I knew exactly what I wanted to do and this is because I did a lot of research during high school to figure out what a good career for me would be. And then another thing is I know a lot of people kind of just wanna get a head start and get into their career as fast as possible. Some people even take college classes while they're in high school. They might graduate from high school a semester or even a year early and then they might even go to an accelerated route in order to get college over with as fast as they possibly can. Now, again, different people are gonna come from different situations. Maybe you're in a position where you've already traveled a bunch and you really don't need to do that anymore. You could be in the opposite situation where you unfortunately don't have enough money in order to travel and do stuff like that, kind of like the situation that I was in. I was personally way too pumped and excited to go to college. I was super excited about going and so I didn't even consider taking a gap year as an option. I do regret it a tiny little bit. A part of me kind of regrets it just because I wish I would have traveled more but I don't think I would have had the funding in order to do it so I don't really regret it all that much. But honestly, this can be a very confusing time especially for young people and sometimes it's a good idea just to take a step back, kind of get off the treadmill so to speak and just relax for a little bit and just evaluate what you wanna do with your life. But if you don't wanna go this route there's gonna be a lot of other options for you. You're gonna have summer break, Christmas break, et cetera where you can probably go traveling and do all kinds of cool stuff. In my opinion, I'd say for maybe 30% of people taking a gap year would be a really good option and the other 70% probably not. But again, it's really gonna change depending on the person and the situation. If you haven't done it already make sure to gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. Make sure to smash the subscribe button and ring the notification bell and then comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera especially if you're someone who has taken a gap year I'd love to hear what you have to say. And before you leave make sure to check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you. What the f**k are you doing?