Stuff You Should Know - What's a gap year anyway?

Episode Date: December 5, 2019

Chuck thought a gap year was post college. Turns out, it's a post high school year off from academics, where you travel the world, help others, and find yourself. Should you do it? We say "yes!" If you can afford it that is.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the Backyard Guest House over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey San Francisco, hey Seattle, come see us because we're going to be there January 18th and 16th. That's right. We're going backwards in time. We'll be at the Moor on the 16th in Seattle. We'll be at the Castro on the 18th in San Francisco as part of Sketchfest. And as always, you can check out ticket links and get all the info you need at our touring home on the web. Thanks to Squarespace at sysklive.com. Booyah. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.

Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there. Me so free since 93. This is not true at all. But it does rhyme, so it's catchy. It could be maybe me so free since three o'clock yesterday afternoon. Yeah, maybe. No, that doesn't count because she's still got a little hunk in her teeth. Oh, God. So, Chuck, we are gathered here today to discuss probably the most important topic we've ever covered. The most hard hitting, timely topic that we've ever taken on. And I'm not sure if we're up to the task, but we're going to give it a try. And what we're talking about today are gap years. Yeah, did this remind you to the old days of stuff you should know? Yeah, a little bit. Hopefully not the new current days of stuff you should know. When the occasional topic would come along, that's slight, and we do it

anyway. Yeah, because as everyone knows, but we haven't said it for a while, we are dedicated to explaining absolutely everything in the universe. And that includes gap years. This is a thing. And I should also point out to the reason I picked this. It's not a turkey. I got Thanksgiving on the brain, but it's not a turkey. No, that was good. No, the reason I picked this was because when I was a teenager, I had never heard of a gap year. And up until very recently, I had heard the term and thought it meant taking a year off after college before you go into the workforce. Yeah, I did not know it was post high school. You could totally do that if you want to completely ruin your life. Oh, shoot, I didn't. I mean, I didn't enter the workforce until I was in my 30s. No, it's true.

It's true. I had jobs. Right. Yeah. So, no, it's a gap year from what I understand is, like you said, it's taking a year off between high school and college to do things like find yourself, to make yourself a more creative person, to see the world, to immerse yourself in other cultures. Maybe volunteer. Yeah, volunteering is a big one. But the crux of it is that you are becoming a more mature person during this year between high school and college, almost like it's a rite of passage. And that when you're done with this year and you go to enter college, you're a much stabler. You've worked on things like grit and resilience and you're a much wiser person than you would have been had you just hopped from high school off to college. That's the idealized

version of it. Yeah, that's the idea. Like I said, I did not know this was an option to me. And maybe that's because I'm an American like you. Yeah, yeah. Because this is not, it's gaining some traction in America, but it is certainly not, we're not gap year heavy here in the states. It seems to be very popular in Europe, especially among the Brits and then especially among the Aussies. They like to take a year off and go see the world and do stuff and kind of decide what they want to do in college. Yeah. And I mean, it's been around for a little while, but it really did just kind of stick to the UK and then Australia. And even still today, like I'm sure there's plenty of people who have no idea what a gap year is who are listening to this. Did you do

it or I'm not, I know you didn't do it, but did you know this was a thing? No, I didn't. I didn't. I think in the United States, it does happen more than we realize, but people don't call it a gap year and it's not necessarily intentional. Did you take a gap year? No, no, I didn't. You went right to college? Yes, I did. And I just kind of worked my way through. And over time actually going from college to college, I actually kind of became a much better student than I was. Had I just followed like a traditional path? Oh yeah. Yeah, where you just go from, you know, one high school to your, you know, college of choice. And so I guess I had some of the benefits of a gap year, but I didn't just take a year off and travel or even, you know, work or anything.

You took a year off while you were in school. Right. I'm like Van Wilder and Ferris Bueller rolled into one. I will say this, you know, I've talked about it before. It took me six years to complete my degree at Georgia. And the first three of those years, I was completely up to date. And then it took me three more years to get that final year. Well, yeah, that's, I mean, what was it that stretched it out? I just, I just tapped the brakes, man. I was having a good time and I dropped my first classes like my junior year. I was like, man, that's, that feels good to go to a class once and be like, nah, you know what? I'm not going to come back. Yeah. And so after I did that a couple of times, I felt, and I was, you know, paying my own way at this point.

My parents helped me out the first couple of years. And then I kind of just worked my way through. Oh, good for you. But I was like, you know, I'm going to do it Chuck style. And I'm just going to slow my roll. And I love Athens. And my friends are all here. So I'm just going to take maybe a class, a quarter, maybe two. And it takes me how long, you know, it's going to take me how long it takes me. So that, that song, don't go back to Rockdale, like really spoke to you. Don't go back to Rockville. Well, no, it was originally Rockdale. Because it was, yeah, it was a Michael Stipe song, maybe, or he had something to do with it. And they were talking about like conures. Oh, really? I did not know that. And I, the reason I also said Rockdale is

because I couldn't remember what they ended up naming the song. Right. But it really was originally Rockdale, I swear. I believe you. Yeah, Rockdale County. I swear. So you used the Spicoli method of graduating your senior year. Yeah, I was, you know, we're Gen Xers. So we very famously, as a generation, weren't like chomping to jump into the corporate workforce when we were 22 years old. Right. We were way too cynical for that. No, man, I had no aims to get a real job anytime soon. So, no, and did you have friends? Because I certainly did, who, man, hit that track or in business school. Yeah. Like had their major completed in like 33 and a half years, maybe went on to get their MBA and were miserable by like age 22. Well, I knew people, I wouldn't say my close

friends because my close friends are all sort of in my boat, which is to say the slow steamer paddle boat. Spicoli method. At the end of the race. Yeah. But I knew of people who did that and they, you know, some of them got jobs, you know, like real jobs at 23 years old. And I just, I don't know, it seemed so weird to me at the time. But now that's sort of what it seems like most people are trying to do. No, it's, and it's true. But, and I remember like all of those people are the ones who've had 401ks for like 15 years longer than you and I have. Yeah, good point. But they also, if I remember correctly, were too a person miserable at least at some point immediately post college. They were not happy people. And a lot of that reason is because

you get burnout and I was researching burnout and it's definitely a thing. It's, it's, it's, it's its own thing, but I couldn't find any studies on like, you know, what was actually going on neurologically or biologically. So it can't be its own show. No, I was kind of hoping, but, but it is treated as a real thing. It's school burnout, study burnout. And there's this idea that if you just kind of hit the books too hard for too prolonged a time, you develop a mental and even physical and emotional fatigue to where your stress level is just at such a high pitch that you're, you're basically your baseline is raised and you're, you're cognitively affected. You're perhaps you develop a diagnosable mental health disorder. I read that something like

a third of students entering college in some poll taken in the last few years had considered suicide and that they had diagnosable mental health conditions and they attribute this to burnout. And so that is one of the, one of the big marks in the favor of taking a gap year is this idea that you can, you can, you know, cut that, that cord of straight from high school to college and then into the workforce and just, just like take some me time and do something different and really explore yourself in the world. And in doing so, you'll kind of recharge your batteries and you can hit college with a fresh start rather than grinding it out from high school straight into college. Yeah. And I also should add this back when we were in high

school and applying to colleges, it was a different deal. Like I didn't have to work very hard in high school to get A's and B's. My high school, it was a good public high school, but it was not that challenging. Is that the social experiment high school? No. Okay. No, it was just a regular high school. But do you remember like, didn't you have like no walls and, and just rub high? Yeah. Did you see all those people who wrote in and said, Josh is right, this is like an actual experiment that was done in the 70s? Well, maybe they'll publish the findings because I didn't, you know, it was a secret experiment if it was one. Okay. But it just wasn't that hard. And so I was never burnt out and felt like, boy, I could use some time off.

And then getting into college was a lot easier back then too. Yeah. Before the Hope Scholarship. Yeah. It was not nearly as competitive even for state schools. And there are high schools though, like that are really tough now. Public high schools, Roswell High School here in the suburbs is notorious for being really, really hard and competitive. And like there are 17 year old kids suffering from academic burnout because it's such a challenging environment. And then trying to get into the schools, you know, with a, you know, I have a 4-0 and it's not good enough. And it's like, are you kidding me? Yeah. It's like a 4-0 in our days. You kind of write your ticket, you know? Oh yeah. You go to Harvard, Yale,

Princeton, you had your pick basically. But all that is to say that I get the benefits for sure of a gap year these days. Yeah. Because I think what you're saying is that things have changed since we were in high school or college. Yes. Yeah. And like it's that, I guess it's that whole rise of helicopter parenting where kids are just like, it's not good enough to have good grades. You have to have a well-rounded resume by the time you are trying to get to college. And yeah, kids are probably way more burned out today than they were back in our day. Yeah. Back in our day, if you were a burnout, it meant you smoked a lot of pot as a teenager. Burnout was a completely different thing. Maybe wore a jean jacket. Right. So there's a gap year.

There is such a thing. And like you said, it's kind of popular in Britain. There was a little lull in 2011, I think between 2011 and 14 where it dropped significantly, which we'll talk about later, but it's steadied again. And it seems to be a rite of passage among British high school kids that's here to stay. It's kind of a thing. Not everyone does it. In fact, not even close to the majority does it, but a significant amount do. And the United States is far less. It's something like 11% in Britain compared to 1.2% in the United States. That was back in 2011. Yeah, these are sort of old, but I bet it's not too different now. Right, yeah. And the reason why is I think it's kind of rooted in that American mentality of like, can you really afford to take

a year off even if you can afford it financially? What are you doing to your future? And that's something that people have really started to explore, especially since Malia Obama took a gap year famously back in I think 2016. It really kind of called the idea to the attention of Americans more than it had been before. Yeah, she did it through a program. And we'll talk a bit about this. There's a couple of ways you can do it. You can wing it and do your own thing, or you can actually sign up for a program that will set you up for your gap year. She used one called Where There Be Dragons. It's a pretty great actual name. And she went to Peru and Bolivia and at one point interned sort of, unfortunately, at the Weinstein Company pre scandal.

Right. So yeah, but she brought like a lot of attention to the idea of like taking a gap year. Yeah, and then went to Harvard because it's not like she was slouching. And that's sort of the point is a gap year doesn't mean you're slouching. It means you're probably more of a go-getter than somebody who might just go straight into public university. Right, exactly. That there's this whole kind of veneer to it, this idea that like you're so good at this, you can take a year off and go see the world and really get an idea of how the other half lives before coming in to get your education in the hopes that your education will now be based on a foundation of understanding and awareness rather than like entitlement so that after you do graduate, you can take everything

you learned and use your powers for good. Like Spider-Man. Yeah, you want to take a break? Yeah, let's take a break and then we'll come back and talk about where all this laziness started in the 1960s. Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast,

Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll

want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck. So it's kind of appropriate that the gap year started in the 60s. It was the 60s. You don't really need to say anything more than that. Yeah, really fits. Yeah. In the United States, our conception of the 60s is pretty close to what happened in the 60s in Great Britain, where the gap year kind of began. And there was already this kind of desire for more and for meaning and spirituality among

Western kids that really kind of dates back to the beat generation who really kind of laid this path. But there wasn't anything like a gap year at the time. And even in the 60s, when people started setting up these programs that would become the foundations of what would become the gap year, they still didn't call it a gap year. It was more like a year of giving back, of seeing the world. All the stuff that you would do on a gap year today, they kind of came along in separate little instances that eventually kind of coalesced into this formalized procedure of taking a gap year. Yeah. And it seems like, and we got some of this stuff from, there is a website called gapyear.com if you want to know everything you need to know about gap years. And it seems

to have really kicked off in earnest aside from just like sort of hippies going off to find themselves in India in the late 60s and 67 with a man named Nicholas McClain Bristol who set up something called Project Trust wherein he took some kids to Ethiopia and to do exactly what you do at a gap year, which is to help people out there to learn about the country, to sort of devote yourself to them for a period of time to learn about them and yourself and how to live independently and stuff like that. And after that, it seemed like the gap year was really sort of a thing. Yeah. Well, they made it a thing like they were the first ones to establish it. And then so that happened simultaneously to like you said, those hippies going to India to find themselves and

following the hippie trail. And that was a thing that was significant. Like there were people who would go backpack from London to Kathmandu in some cases or at least to Goa on the coast of India. They would go through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan. They would like hitchhike through these places. And it was like a real experience to do something like this. So that was going on at the same time that like a formal program that introduced the idea of taking a year off and going to volunteer was going on as well. And there was a guy who in the 1970s, I think 1973, his name was Graham Turner. His nickname was screw, S-K-R-O-O. Yeah. It's important to spell that one out.

Yeah. He bought a double decker bus, like the famous London buses and sold tickets on it and drove from London to Kathmandu following that hippie trail and really kind of spread the word that this was a thing. It was no longer just backpacking. You could take like a tour, an actual tour bus tour down this hippie trail. And he actually ended up founding two companies. One was Topdeck Travel, which refers to that bus travel. And another one was Flight Center. And they were like the first hippie gap year travel companies that were ever established, which was another big deal to help kind of build this foundation for gap years. Yeah. And he was successful. He was an Aussie that was based out of London. But

I think the first one was in 1973. And by 1980, he had between 70 and 80 of these buses. Yeah, I saw that. So it really gained steam pretty fast because like you said, people were doing it anyway. And for someone to make it easier on you by formalizing it and saying, hey, we'll take you. Just save up a little bit of money. And these were bus trips. So I imagine they were fairly affordable in the 70s and early 80s. So it didn't cost a lot of money. And it really made gap years kind of explode at the time. Yep. And then so you've got all these kind of components revving out there doing their own thing.

Another one that kind of came along and helped things was when Tony and Maureen Wheeler did like a trip to Asia overland, like they basically backpacked to Asia from I think London. And they made it to Australia, I believe, where they lived for a few years and got jobs and were just kind of hanging out. But people they met in Australia kept bothering them for like tips on how to do that same route to Asia. And they ended up putting everything together into a book called Asia on the Cheap. Across Asia. Yeah. Across Asia on the Cheap, sorry. And they wrote it themselves. They published it themselves. Tony took it to bookstores and said, hey, I've got this book. You guys want this? And people started buying it. And it became

the first title in the Lonely Planet series. They ended up founding Lonely Planet. Yeah, which is, I mean, if you're a kid who has put on a backpack, then you've probably seen some of the Lonely Planet titles in your travels. I never owned one. I think we were, me and my buddy were Let's Go dudes. So there was another brand called the Let's Go Europe or whatever. Let's Go Costa Rica. Yeah. So we had Let's Go Europe, but there were definitely Lonely Planet people in the hostels. And we used to get into knife and chain fights with them over, which was the better book series. Yeah, those are brutal fights. It was tough. But so that's another thing too. And so as all these people are kind of contributing these

different pieces, like this alternative travel industry is starting to develop, right? Or before, if you wanted to go see the world, you really kind of had to pay like a tour operator or a travel agent or something like that. And now if you had the wherewithal to say, I don't want to do all that tourist stuff. I want to see the real world. There was this new kind of industry that was being generated in the late 60s and early 70s, mid 70s at the latest, that would help you do that. Like on the cheap, on your own, like you could buy a Lonely Planet book and follow the guide and just do it yourself. And all this stuff was new. And so as people started to kind of notice that like, oh, I could go do this for a year.

And maybe a good time to do it would be after high school. This idea of a gap year really started to kind of develop. In 1977, there was a group called the Gap Activity Projects. I think it's called Latitude Global Volunteering now. And they kind of picked up where Project Trust led off. And I think Project Trust is still around. So I guess they would be competitors or colleagues or whatever. But where they basically organize tours for people who want to go volunteer, where you just say, there's where I want to go. And that's what I want to do. And they say, perfect. We'll handle all of your visa applications. We'll handle all of your plane tickets. We'll handle your itinerary. On this day, you're going to go sightseeing. On this day, you're going

to go help trap poachers on a safari. We'll handle all of your stuff for you. Exactly. But we'll handle all this stuff for you. It's just give us some money. And that's really an important point that gets kind of overlooked. Like what this is is a sector of the travel industry. Like a booming, thriving sector of the travel industry where other parts of the travel industry are in real trouble or were for a little while from things like Expedia and things that let you do it yourself. On the internet. Yeah, that's what it's called. As a whole. I had an aneurysm and I thought the internet was called Expedia. But you know, that kind of, I mean, I know there are still travel agents, but the internet largely helped kill that industry except for, because you used

to call a travel agent just to book a plane ticket a lot of times. Right. But what I find hardening Chuck is like that the industry and others like it are still around. Like there was a huge transition period where the internet disrupted everything from, you know, magazines to travel industry. Yeah. But that's stabilized. Like a lot of people have had to go find other work. Sure. But there's still a lot of travel agents around and they've like figured out how to carve their own niche and the industry has survived still. Yeah. The internet is not like a cold killer of industry left and right. It did not necessarily mean the death knell for all things great. But I think now travel agents are more likely to do for adults what they do for the gap

here, which is plan like an adventure for you. Right. And a little less like, hey, I need to fly to Cleveland next week. What kind of flights you got? Yeah, you're kind of a simpleton if you're buying something from a travel agent for that. How did they make their money? I don't even remember. I mean, I use travel age. Did they just, they had a Vig that you had to pay? Yeah, I would guess it's kind of like a fee built in or something. Here's what your package costs. And they, you know, spent X number of dollars putting it all together and added like a 10 or 20% markup onto that. And that's what you pay. Yeah, I don't remember. That's what I would guess. Those were the days, weren't they? I can't imagine anyone else booking my travel now. Like occasionally,

through work, we'll have to do something and someone will offer to book travel for us. And both of us are always like, no, no, no, no, no. No, you'll do it wrong. That is the, like wakes me up in a cold sweat is that someone has booked me like a window seat or something. Right. What about my sky miles? Yeah, that do booked me in a window seat. Man, I have a bladder the size of like a, a shelled P. Yeah. I have to sit in the aisle. I do too, man. On an hour flight, I'll get up like three times sometimes if I'm not careful. Yeah. Was that wasn't you the other day? No, that was someone else. Someone was asking me about, maybe it was Noel got, you know, the old request to swap seats. So they could sit together. Yeah. And Noel didn't do it and was

feeling bad about it. And I made him feel better about it. You know, that's so funny, Chuck. I've got some Bader Meinhof going on because you mean I had a conversation about that. And I've seen on like my Quora newsletter and then another just random searches that has been coming up a lot lately. Like people want to know what to say if they don't want to do that. Yeah. I mean, Noel, I think his decision was very cut and dry. It was, you know, a boyfriend and a girlfriend that required Noel to move from the aisle to the center seat. Yeah. And I was like, don't feel bad about that, man. Like they can survive a two hour flight. Right. If it's mommy and little kid or like elderly couple or something like that, that's something I would definitely at least

consider. Right. But I just want to sit next to my sweetie for the next 90 minutes. I'm like, I'm sorry. We can't be apart. Yeah, you can be apart. Yeah. Or you could take another flight. That's an option. All right. Or you can stay home. I don't care. Be nice about it. But yeah, I don't think, in fact, I told Noel, I said they're actually in the wrong for even asking you to do that. A lot of people would argue that. A lot of people would argue that. I mean, like I can see saying, well, this is an aisle for an aisle. Oh, sure. I would ask that. But it's a like seat. Isle for middle, no. Yeah, you can't do that. Like the aisle seat is king. It's the ace. It's the Trump card. You can't just willy-nilly ask for an aisle seat because... No, there are window

people though. Some people love the window, but what I know there are none of is there are no middle seat lovers. That is absolutely true. Yeah. So well, geez, man, should we take another break or press on? Well, maybe let's get through the 90s because the backpacking, the independent backpacker thing really came along in the 80s and 90s and much more so in the States. And that was when you... It was sort of the salad days of flying because plane tickets got really cheap there for a while. Yes. And it was clearly not sustainable because you could fly for $200 a long way on a flight with like 19 other people. And I never had the business sense to look around and be like, something about this is not going to end well. And what happened was they realized

they needed to fill up flights and they could charge a lot more and people would still fly. Right. But when flights were super, super cheap or they had stuff like air hitch, which is what I used to go to Europe, I don't know if they still have air hitch, but there are a lot of... You bought a coupon basically for like $150 that said, maybe. Well, basically you go to the airport on this day and we will put you on some flight to Europe. So it's tailor made for the backpacker. It's like, I don't really care where I start, just get me over there. That's awesome, man. And so they had partner airlines so you would buy a coupon and then it was very exciting. You would go and you would show up at the airport not knowing

where you were going to be that night. That's pretty cool. It was very cool and it always worked out. Not so great if you have a meeting in Munich that day. No, no, no, no. But because that's really rolling the dice. But it was super cheap. I think it was like 300 bucks round trip to Europe. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, even in like the 80s or early 90s, that was super cheap. You can't fly to Nashville for that now for a minute. No, try it. You can't do it. Can't do it. So yeah, the 90s kind of saw a bit of an explosion, especially in the UK, because there was this now kind of structure that people could just kind of jump into and say, I'm taking a gap year. See you next year. And they could just choose what they wanted to do.

And they could also find out what they needed to do. They could get information a lot more easily thanks to gap year.com, that website that you cited earlier. That was founded in 1998. And it's widely considered one of the first social media sites. And it's exclusively for people taking gap years. And it always has been. And it's still around. And they still give great advice on what to do during a gap year, how to do it, how to cut costs, what programs are good, what aren't. It's just a good website. Yeah. So how about we talk about all that stuff after another break? Oh, okay. Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty

surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia, who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host on the podcast. Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show. Hey, dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey, dude, as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co stars,

friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey, dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck, another break is coming gone. It's time to talk again about gap years.

Yeah. So first of all, let's talk to parents of kids. If you're a parent and your kid is talking about taking a gap year, don't freak out. We get the inclination maybe to get nervous about what goes on during that year. Will my child ever come back? Are there any dangers, like real concerns? I'm not dismissing those concerns, but it's okay. Your kid most likely is going to come back enriched. They've done studies that found that kids do better in that first year of college. A lot of them have, I think they zero in on their major more quickly after doing a gap year. Yeah. One thing I saw on that note, Chuck, was that there was a Wall Street Journal article about gap years and they profiled a woman who had gone to India

to help bring solar power to a village and had lived in a tent for a few weeks and was like, I hate this more than anything I've ever hated before and I'm not doing this. And so she figured out during her gap year that she didn't want to do that. Whereas if she had gone to college straight out of high school, she would have applied herself to that, gone through college, and then gone and done that and found out that she hated it. So she said in that sense, this gap year saved her about 200 grand in four years. Interesting by telling her what she didn't like. Exactly, which is a really good point. I mean, mostly you learn what you do want to do or it helps you. I think there's some statistic that shows some high percentage of children

who go on a gap year have their path forward reinforced from that gap year. But I'm sure there's a significant number of people who are like, I don't want to help people. I'm a missing tip. Another concern parents might have is there's so much focus on the resume for that college application. And gap years look great on a resume now. Colleges get it. And a lot of colleges, if you're accepted, can even defer your start by a year if you want to go on a gap year. So they really are trying to work hand in hand with high school students to say get out there, volunteer, immerse yourself in a culture, and come back and see us when you're 19 and you're not just, you just don't want to funnel beer all the time because you're fresh out of the house.

And some colleges get it so much that, for example, Princeton not only has a deferment program where you can say, I'm in, I'll see you in a year. I'm going to go take a year off. They say, well, wait, we actually have a project or a program that helps you go do that stuff for the gap year. And it's through the university. And FSU, Florida State University has a program where if you defer for a gap year, you're automatically considered for financial aid to help you on your gap year. Oh, cool. Yeah, it is pretty cool. They also have a clown school, don't they? FSU does. Isn't Florida State, don't they have like a circus college? I mean, it would make sense because Florida is like traditionally like the state where

circuses went and took a rest for the winter. Oh, really? Yeah. I didn't know that. Well, that makes sense. I wonder if, I'm going to have to look that up. I don't know. I know there's something, some kind of circus school in Florida, but it may not be tied to Florida State. It could be, though. It very well could be. So there's a book that a woman named Kristen White wrote called The Complete Guide to the Gap Year where she talks about some of the things you can do that aren't just like partying around the world. And volunteering is, of course, one of those things as well as living with a family in another culture. That's one of the best ways to really learn about a new place is to live with a host family. Can I also add on gapyear.com, there was an opinion

piece that said, if you really want to live like a local, because that's a big buzz term for a gap year, people is learning to live like a local to really immerse yourself. They said, get an international internship. Go work and you have to get up at a certain time. You have to get on the subway. You have to find a favorite restaurant. You have to go grocery shopping. That's how you truly live like a local during your gap year is to have responsibilities that the locals have. Then you can genuinely understand it. Plus, there's tons of other benefits too, like you get paid. You make business contacts in other countries, which can be very valuable. They said that's the best way to do it. And as an American, I'm like, yes,

I'll bet that is the best gap year there is working. Well, I mean, here's the thing. There are certainly plenty of programs where you can volunteer and do a service year. And those are great. But you can also like, it's not selfish if you're an artist and you want to go live in France and paint for a year and learn at the side of a mentor. All those things are great. It's whatever you think is going to enrich you in your future is what you should concentrate on. Yes. Some people take a year off to learn an instrument or to write a novel. There's a lot of gap year programs that are geared toward things like helping the environment

or helping science to where you might be doing surveys, underwater surveys of coral reefs to track coral bleaching. Or like I said, there's some programs where you combat poachers by finding snares and undoing them to stuff like that. So there's a lot of training you can do where if you know you want to be an environmental scientist, you can actually go get field work to prepare you for your career down the road. Or again, find out that you actually don't want to be an environmental scientist who has to do field work. So there's like this benefit of not just going and spending a year in Ibiza and doing as much ecstasy as you can and stay alive before you go to college. That's how some people do it, I think, but they're like the go-getters are like,

no, this is what I think I want to do. I'm going to go try it out firsthand and then go learn how to do it in college and tell my professors how they're teaching it wrong because I've been there and done it and I have life experience and they don't. Yeah. And like we said, there's not a ton of studies, but they have, we talked a little bit about some of the results. There are other surveys that said, you know, they say you're going to come back feeling very independent, more mature, you're going to have more motivation to learn and a stronger interest in school. I think the one you were talking about 60% said their gap year confirmed their career path. Yeah. And then one study out of Australia said, if you were a gapper, then you outperform your

peers in that first semester of college and overall have better college grades. Yeah. Middlebury College in Vermont did a poll and found that their gap year students outperformed non-gap year students by 0.1 to 0.4 on a 4.0 scale, which is significant, especially 0.4. Yeah. But even more significant that that effect lasted like all four years of college rather than just that first year. Right. And it might have been the same study, but there was that one combined with the University of North Carolina that said it even helps post-graduate, the post-graduate get a higher rate of job satisfaction. Right. So it kind of sets you up. It even said that in retirement, you're happier.

It said that when you die, your last words will invariably be gap year. Thank God I did a gap year. Here's the thing though. It sounds like the perfect thing for everyone. I can see situations where if you are in a super tight-knit senior class and a lot of those kids are going to the same college, you might really feel like you've been left behind a bit that if they all go to state university and you're off in Ethiopia. So I get that. They also say in this article from howstuffworks.com about maybe giving a little rusty study-wise. I don't really buy that.

I've seen that elsewhere though. Really? Is that a thing? Yeah. It's like, hey, you might be learning Swahili and that's great, but you're probably not doing math at the same time too. Yeah. I guess you can get a little rusty. I just remember at that age, your brain is so plastic. No, it's true. How long does it really take? Yeah. You pick it back up pretty quick, I would guess. Although there is that whole thing, the whole reason that they use for lengthening the school year and shortening summer is the idea that you lose so many of

the things you've lost over a long summer. That's true. Yeah. Imagine a year. There's also this whole scariness of competing in the job market and can you really afford to delay entering the job market for a year? Yes, you can. Yeah, but I mean, that's a very American fear. No, you're setting yourself back. You got to stay competitive. You got to stay in the game. You can't just take a year off and go find yourself. Who taught you that, you hippie? Yeah. That's a real American thought. There are fears among, say, parents of kids who want to

take a gap year. There's also criticisms of the idea of a gap year in general, from not even necessarily people who are involved in it, just externally people who say, this is something wrong with this. This stinks of privilege, if you ask me. Yeah, I get that because they're generally not cheap. If you can afford to take a year off and do anything for a year where you're not getting paid, then there's got to be some privilege attached to that. Yeah, that's one. There's another charge of neocolonialism where there's this idea of Western kids finding themselves by dropping themselves temporarily in the destitute lives of other people around the world. That they know they will leave in 12

months. Exactly. They could walk out that day and they'd be fine. But they get to take a few selfies with some underprivileged children in Africa and post them and change their profile picture and what right do they have to go do that? That's a big one that gets levied against it. That's a big point of debate because you can't just objectively say that that's correct or incorrect. There are some elements of neocolonialism to it. It can be done wrong, but people who defend the idea of gap years, especially volunteering on gap year, will say, no, there are a lot of very ethical gap year tour companies that take that stuff into consideration and won't put you in that situation where if you're going to help, you're actually going to help.

There was this famous, I think it was posted on HuffPo, a famous article called Little White Girls Boys and Voluntourism. The writer was a gap year student who basically was like, no, this is wrong. This isn't actually helping. The people who were helping with these community construction projects are having to go back and renail these two by fours because the people who are doing this are just teenagers who don't know what they're doing. We've never been trained to do this. Not only are we not helping, we're actually slowing things down. Apparently, people who are the recipients of this aid from gap year programs don't feel like they're in a position to be like, thanks, but no thanks. Thanks for the garbage house. Right. Or thanks for your

charity, but go to hell. They don't feel like they're in a position to say that. There is this idea of Westerners pressing themselves on the lives temporarily of people who are in developing countries that don't even necessarily want the help, but could still use it or don't feel like that they're in a position to say no. I would like to thank for every kid that's there for the selfies. There's another kid who may go on to not even go back to college and make that their life's work. Yeah, I think it's probably a much higher ratio than that. I get the impression that the kids who actually go do the volunteering for gap year are actually starting to dip their toe into a career in an NGO where they will go on and help people. They do take it very seriously.

It's just the ethics among tour operators has changed and improved in the last couple years from what I understand. Yeah, and if you think that you want to pursue life working for a non-profit and doing this kind of work, you should get out there and test the waters first before you make any big decisions because it's not for everyone. It is very emotionally challenging and physically challenging stuff and spending a year doing it can either way. If it's confirming great, if it's confirming that this is not for you, then that's great as well. Right, and the author of The Little White Girl's Boys and Volunteerism, she said, stop and ask yourself a really important question. Will the project that you're working on

be better off if you're there helping? Yeah, will they benefit from your presence? Would they have trouble completing it without your help? If they answer yes, she says then go for it. But if the answers no, then maybe reconsider what you're doing or take the time to go learn that skill first so that you are actually helping. The author's name is Pippa Biddle, which is maybe the most British name anyone's ever given their child. If you are planning to do a gap year, take some time to really think about how you want to do it because there are myriad ways and directions that you can go. Think about what you want to get accomplished, whether it's learning how to paint better or volunteering or helping the

environment, and then apply to college. You don't want to put that off. You want to go ahead and apply to college. So A, you know where you want to go when you get back and B, like we're talking about, they might have programs in place that can really help you out and really get structured about what you want to do. And if there's high school kids listening, this is especially important if you want to sell your parents on this idea. Don't just throw it out at the dinner table one night. Hey, what do you think about a year off? Come with a plan in place and that is the stuff that will impress your parents. Right, exactly. Because you can plan your own gap year, but sure, whether you take a planned tour, a pre-planned tour, or a plan it yourself,

there does have to be structure else. Again, you end up in Ibiza for a year. Or some people, apparently, will just sit around and watch Netflix or play video games for a year. That's the exact opposite of what you want to do. Like you want to do something. It doesn't have to be like the most highly charged, helpful, volunteering type of program you could possibly engage in, but it also, you actually want to do something that's enriching yourself at least. Yeah, I mean, you could walk around Europe with a backpack on your back. Just meeting people, sure. I mean, that's fine too. Just don't play video games ever. But you know what I'm saying. I know that they get a bad rap unfairly a lot, but it's code for

laziness. If you've kind of focused your sights on something, try and find out as much as you can about the place, the program, as in not just a little research on the internet. Like, see if you can talk to someone who's done it and really know what you're getting into. Like, what is a day like building houses in a developing nation? Like, what kind of hours am I going to be putting in? Am I up to that task? Because like we've been saying here, you're not only not going to do yourselves any favor, but you're going to be a burden on that program if you get down there and you're extra weight. Yeah. So one of the other things that parents are probably very fearful of when their kid says gap year, they can cost quite a bit. Yeah, writing a big check.

This house stuff works article says 30 to 40 grand. I'm sure that it's more than that by now, because I think it's a few years old. But there's ways you can offset that cost. There are gap year programs that you can engage in that are way cheaper than that. Some are free and some, I think, AmeriCorps or City Year, they might be the same thing. One of those guys actually pays you a stipend of $5,700 at the end of the year, which is, I mean, if you think of it as the pay for a year's worth of work, it's terrible. It's prison wage. But this is like it's meant to help offset your tuition and say like, hey, good job, way to go. You did it. But they don't charge you a dime. And some other places also will give you free room and board typically with local families.

So not only are you getting free room and board as part of the program, you're also immersing yourself in that culture by living with that family. Yeah. And sometimes universities even have programs where you can earn school credits that not necessarily that you can just take anywhere, but that you can use for your specific university that you have pledged to attend. I saw somewhere though that you want to be very careful with that because if you do a deferment program where you say, I'm applying to college, great, I got in, I'm going to take a year off for a gap year and they say, okay, some universities aren't okay with you taking credit courses at another accredited university.

So you want to check with them first before you do that. I think that's it. You got anything else? Got nothing else? Do it, kids. Gap it up. Yeah. And if you took a gap year, let us know. We want to hear about it. How it affected you or didn't affect you or whatever. Okay. Agreed. If you want to know more about gap years, actually we can send you to HowStuffWorks and you can check out this article on that site. And since I said HowStuffWorks, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this one, what am I going to call this one? Oh, cockney rhyming slang. All right. We got a lot of feedback about that. A lot of angry Brits. A lot of Brits with good senses of humor. Sure. That knew that we were going to botch it probably. I didn't see any

angry Brits. Do we have any? Oh, I think a lot of kind of jokingly angry Brits. Oh, oh, gotcha. But this is from an Aussie. He said, they're never angry. Nope. Hey, chaps. Love the episode. And like Josh, I knew immediately after Chuck tried his hand at cockney that he sounded like someone famous. Michael Cain was a solid guess, but I was thinking Mike Myers as Austin Powers. He says, for what it's worth, rhyming slang is wildly prevalent amongst cricket players in Australia. Back when I used to play competitively, it was at once a science and an art form either developing or deciphering their slang being used by the teammates, by your teammates. It often took many forms, including traditional slang, like butcher's hook for look, or

he's had an absolute berry, meaning shocker, i.e. a poor performance, taken from the Australian comedian and actor Barry Crocker. That's a deep cut. The names of some of famous players being used as descriptions also, such as David Boone for tunes, put on some David Boones. I guess David Boone is a famous cricketer. Sure. As you might imagine, when you're spending all day standing in a field in the Aussie sun or watching others do that from the sidelines, you look for any activity to keep your mind engaged. Rhyming slang was a hilarious mainstay in that respect. Enough from me. Keep up the good work, guys. You're my daily dose of a good old bubble bath. We're a bubble bath for Tom McGlasson in Sydney, Australia.

Thanks, Tom. That was a great one. Much appreciated. Thanks to everybody who wrote in about the Cockney rhyming slang episode. It did generate a ton of email, didn't it? It did, strangely. If you want to generate a ton of email for us, you can start by going to Stuff You Should Know and follow us on our social links there. You can also send us an email to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days

of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody

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