The benefits of taking a Gap Year are many and blend together across multiple areas. We have attempted to cut to the chase by sifting and sorting the benefits into statistically proven benefits and some of the less tangible benefits that more play a role in shaping the person. Taking a structured Gap Year invariably serves to develop the individual into a more focused student with a better sense of purpose and engagement in the world. From Joe O’Shea’s book, Gap Year: How Delaying College Changes People in Ways the World Needs: “Some studies have looked at the academic performance of gap year students while in college.
In Australia and the United Kingdom, economic researchers found that high school students who deferred their admission to college to take a Gap Year went to college (after their Gap Year) at the same rate as those who accepted an offer and intended to go straight there (Birch and Miller 2007; Crawford and Cribb 2012).
They also found that taking a Gap Year had a significant positive impact on students’ academic performance in college, with the strongest impact for students who had applied to college with grades on the lower end of the distribution (Birch and Miller 2007; Crawford and Cribb 2012).”
In fact, in the United Kingdom and in the United States, students who had taken a Gap Year were more likely to graduate with higher grade point averages than observationally identical individuals who went straight to college, and this effect was seen even for Gap Year students with lower academic achievement in high school (Crawford and Cribb 2012, Clagett 2013).
http://americangap.org/data-benefits.php