If I hadn’t flunked out of college, I wouldn’t have met Buckskin Bader.Like any number of high school graduates, I rushed into college the year after finishing high school, thinking I knew what I wanted to become — in my case, a doctor. Three things convinced me I wasn’t cut out for that profession. They were calculus, chemistry and structural anatomy.
I might have gotten a tutor, and survived calculus and chemistry, but when they dropped an embalmed cat in a bag on our desks the first day of anatomy and told us it had to last the semester, then assigned me a lab partner who was studying mortuary science and working nights at one of the local funeral homes (which was where we’d have to study), I began thinking I’d made a serious mistake.
I didn’t officially drop out. I just quit going to class until the notice arrived at our home that I’d flunked out. Which left me trying to figure out how to make a living, since the parents’ financial support ran out the day the notice arrived from the college.
For the next year and a half, I cobbled together a living doing the two things for which I thought I had some aptitude — photography and writing. I worked as a part-time rodeo photographer, traveling around the area shooting pictures of cowboys and cowgirls, and submitting the occasional piece for magazines and newspapers that weren’t too discriminating in the quality of their prose.
One of those on speculation writing assignments was to interview an old codger named Buckskin Bader, a former safari guide, who looked kind of like a derelict Wild Bill Hickok, and who’d come to Wyoming on a visit and wound up buying the whole town of Ucross. He straightaway proclaimed himself mayor, chief of police, fire chief and anything else he could think of; opened a gas station that sold beef jerky, frozen pizza, Coors and Twinkies; set up a still to fabricate moonshine; and put up a sign on the way into town that said, “Welcome to Ucross. Population 1. No Church. No Jail. Cold Beer.”
A lifelong practical joker, he buried his brother out behind the gas station under a tombstone that read, “Here Lies Lloyd Bader. Self Abuse Killed Him.”
It was a great joy when my photographs and story appeared on the front page of a small magazine, and the satisfaction it brought set me on a career path I’m still following today. When I went back to college the next year studying literature and writing, I sailed right through. Even taught a few college classes on my own after I graduated.
And met about a thousand freshmen who were exactly like I had been, going to college right out of high school with no real desire to be there, no idea what they wanted to study, and no determination to succeed. It was our job to weed them out, and the expectation was that less than 50 percent of arriving freshmen would eventually graduate with degrees.
I always counseled those leaving school to take a year or two off, support themselves and get some real-world experience, then come back and try it again.
In my case, that year off had been the best thing that ever happened to me. It made me appreciate the value of a dollar. It taught me about life outside the classroom. It focused my thinking about a career. And it made me want to succeed when I went back to school and paid for the rest of my education out of my own pocket.
I’ve thought a lot about that year recently, as our Greater Media Newspapers chronicled the stressful and expensive college preparation and application process of a number of high school graduates in our area. And I’ve wondered why nobody is telling some of these kids it might be a good idea to take a year off and see how things work out.
In Britain, they’ve realized the benefits of that idea, and it has become institutionalized in what is known as the “Gap Year.” According to The Associated Press, about 11 percent of all British students take a year off between their equivalent of high school and college, and as many as a third of students from prestigious prep schools take them. Prince William spent part of his gap year living in the jungles of Belize and part of it working in Chile as a volunteer for Raleigh International. Prince Harry went to Australia to work on a sheep farm.
In that country, prospective employers look at both degrees and life experience during the gap year when hiring new graduates.
In this country, however, it hasn’t exactly caught on yet. Perhaps that’s because parents are so nervous about the increasing competition for college placements, they’re wary of anything that looks like an unusual life choice. Perhaps kids and parents are worried that if they get off the treadmill for a year, the world will pass them by and they won’t be able to get back on.
That might be changing, however. Both Harvard and Sarah Lawrence now send letters to admitted applicants encouraging them to take a year off, as long as they don’t use it to apply to other colleges. The University of Chicago will grant deferrals to almost any student who submits a proposal that doesn’t consist entirely of lying on the beach. And in Boston, according to The Associated Press, a company called Taking Off has even been founded to help students plan how to spend their down time productively.
“It’s reached the point where a lot of us in admissions are talking about ways to get students to just kind of relax,” Martha Merrill, dean of admission and financial aid at Connecticut College, told the AP.
If those students use part of their gap years in some sort of volunteer service to their fellow man, you have to figure that’s a situation where everybody wins. And whatever is spent supporting them during the gap year is likely less than what their parents would spend for the same time at college.
“If you look at the investment of the first year of college when your kid is not ready to go, it’s money well spent,” said Gail Reardon, who founded Taking Off.
Who would have thought, all those years ago — sipping moonshine from Buck Bader’s still — I was so far ahead of my time?
Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers.