The Washington Post is encouraging the children of ordinary, workadaddy Americans to slack off for a year after graduating from high school because first daughter Malia Obama has decided to take a 14-month vacation before enrolling at fancypants Harvard University.
America’s high school students “should be following Malia’s lead and getting off the conveyor belt that leads them to follow the well-plotted and well-trod course to college simply because they don’t know what else to do with their lives,” the Post’s “analysis” writer, Jeffrey J. Selingo, writes — in the course of plugging his book, “There Is Life After College.”
Are so-called “gap years” expensive? Yes, the Post’s analysis of loafing off for a year admits. Is deferring college for a year typically the province of “rich kids” who “go backpacking through Europe”? Yes, that too.
However, the Post argues, newly-minted low- and middle-income high school grads who pay “gap-year providers” to spend over a year finding themselves can save money by graduating college faster — fully five years after high school, say, and not six — if the year of navel-gazing helps them become more directed.
Students who take a year off can “explore careers, work and earn money, and learn new skills,” the Post promises. However, such exploration shouldn’t include “working part time at McDonald’s” or anything so common — so low. Instead, any job should provide “meaningful work experience.”
What the Post really likes about gap years is the exciting opportunity for travel without “close supervision” or a “regimented schedule.” Students who wander about America or the world “not only end up with higher grades in college, but they also graduate at the same rate as those who don’t delay at all,” the Post declares — without bothering to explain the cost of these excellent adventures or any other such trifling considerations.
The Post’s analysis that notes that, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama, “plenty of parents” “worry their kids will take a permanent detour and skip college altogether.”
Barack Obama’s net worth is estimated to be $12.2 million by the website Celebrity Networth.
The current cost for a year of undergraduate tuition, fees and room and board at Harvard, where Malia Obama will enroll in the fall of 2017, is $63,025.
Tuition at Sidwell Friends School, the posh Washington, D.C. private high school the first daughter has attended, is $39,360 per year (but that includes a hot lunch). (RELATED: The School Lunches Malia And Sasha Eat Vs. The Crap Michelle Obama Has Foisted On America)
In 2014, in a hard-hitting interview in Parade magazine, Barack and Michelle Obama suggested that they were actively searching for dead-end, low-paying jobs for their two daughters so the teenagers can appreciate the quiet desperation that millions of Americans experience. (RELATED: Obama Wants Daughters To Work Crappy Minimum-Wage Jobs So They Understand America)
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