| Once you are five years out of college, your resume lists work experience and the year you graduated from college. Most folks won't care whether you were the hotshot that got early admission, or the kid that took an extra year to finish university. The framework I would use here is: is this a reversible or irreversible decision? Some factors I would consider: - Do you think you will enjoy it? For me, it was four years of responsibility (buying groceries, doing my own laundry, learning to cook) but also four years of freedom (choosing my own bedtime, dating without being judged by parents). - Can you defer an offer / reapply next year? (Ask the admissions department; most of the time the answer is yes, but there are details.) - Do you have peers from high school that are going this year? (No one I knew was still hanging out with their high school friends after Thanksgiving, but I found it helped with the loneliness of the first week of living in dorms.) - Do you have a place to live if you don't go to college? (Does your job cover rent for your own place? Alternatively, are you on good enough terms with your parents to stay in your bedroom / in their basement?) - Would inertia lead you to never go to college? You may find it harder to go to college once you have a comfortable adult quality of life. If this happens to you, would you regret it? - Will you have opportunities to socialize in college? (Dorms, student clubs, student newspapers, etc.) - Do you think the job market will have recovered by the time you graduate? (I started my Bachelor's in 2009. On the other hand, folks are saying that the current recession is worse than the '08 crisis.) Where is the breakeven point for lifetime earnings between current job versus post-college job with college debt? - What are plausible bad-case outcomes for each path, and how can you mitigate the downsides? Time-box this to maybe an hour of research: you want to be emotionally prepared for this possibility but not let it become all-consuming anxiety. (Consider: What does the world look like if we don't find a vaccine?) |