One is through a deferral year. In this instance, your son would apply to college as if he’s heading there after high school. Once he has his admission offers in hand, he would commit to one school in which he is interested by May 1 of senior year. Then, at some later time, but probably before July and before putting down all or a large part of his first year’s tuition, he would write a letter requesting to defer his entrance for a semester or year, typically with some type of plan in mind which he would outline. Most colleges would accept the deferral, though you should check the fine print for all the colleges to which he is applying to make sure they don’t rule it out completely (few do).
The second approach is to plan on a gap year. Unlike a deferral year, the downside is that the student now has to worry about how the gap year will affect future college admissions, and must utilize the summer and a lot of the fall after graduating high school to complete the college admissions process. This can work well for a student who is unready to apply to colleges during senior year of high school, and/or wants to show academic and possibly activity progress (sports are big here) from a completed senior year prior to sending in applications. Then, one can structure multiple, exciting, and valuable gap year activities both to facilitate growth and progress, and to have a positive effect on admissions evaluators.
We should mention a third option for a gap year, which is a post-graduate year at a boarding school. A more structured, academic year, this facilitates a student’s applying to colleges with additional academic foundation building as well as, possibly, strengthening a sport or other major interest.
In other words, your daughter could apply to some colleges this year, and then if she gains admission to a college she likes, she can still ask the school to defer her admission for a year. Most colleges will approve this request, especially if she has a good plan in mind for her year off. She would ask the college for the deferral in May or June of her senior year, once the admission process is over. We often encourage students to suspend judgment for a time, and to go through the college admissions process, thereby possibly opening up some exciting options that might be of interest in the spring, if and when she decides she might indeed want to go directly to college.
Alternately, some students do decide to delay applications, and this is really a fine choice to make in terms of long-term admissions options. She must focus during her senior year, and do as well as possible, while also completing standardized test requirements and asking for teacher recommendations by the end of senior year. That will give her the freedom during her gap year to focus on her activities, and on the application process, while applying from a strong academic foundation.
A good plan, perhaps consisting of several varied activities, is important. Work, volunteerism, study abroad — she can combine several options, and then will need to write about them compellingly to explain to colleges why she took the year off, and what she has learned from it. She won’t have as much support from her high school in her year off, so she’ll need to be more independent during the admissions process, but, again, if done well and for the right reasons, a gap year can be productive, fulfilling, and, yes, positive in terms of college admissions.
Another option is to apply to PG programs abroad, such as the American School in Switzerland (TASIS) or TASIS in London, the many international schools around Europe, and some of the American schools abroad (many of these work well if they have the International Baccalaureate, or IB, curriculum). Some of the European and U.K. schools (sometimes called colleges) also admit American students for one year of additional “A level” study after high school and before college. The Oxford Advanced Study Program offers a specific PG year for international students in England.
One thing to watch out for is the following. If you enter full-time, university-level study, you will be ineligible to apply to American colleges as a freshman (first-year) applicant. You will automatically be deemed a transfer applicant, and this will change your process, as fewer transfer spots are usually available. If you take a deferral year, you will usually be prohibited from attending a university home or abroad as a full-time student.
International students bring desirable diversity to boarding school campuses, and if they are academically qualified, and potentially add other skill sets and contributions to campus, they can be quite sought after by American boarding schools, many of which actively recruit abroad, from Costa Rica to Korea to Africa.