In some countries, young people are encouraged to work or travel for a year between finishing high school and starting university studies. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this occurrence.

It is common these days for young high school graduates in some countries to take a break off school work before starting their first degree. This trend is not just for the rich, but rather for everyone who is done with high school. The positive and negative effects of this will be discussed below. High school graduates taking a break off school work for a year before beginning university education has some merits. One of such merits is that, they learn how to deal with real-life situations. Another positive reason for taking a break off is that, it aids in better career selection. Some young ones prefer to work in other to improve in their skills, and then choose the right career path. For example, a friend of mine chose to study software engineering after she was introduced to some programming languages while waiting to get her Senior Secondary Certificate Examination result. However, there are some drawbacks in letting young high school graduates go on study break before starting university. Firstly, students may not return to school. They might conclude that it is better to continue in the job they are in, or to do something completely different from a university degree. Secondly, young adults may find it difficult to re-adapt to the academic environment. For instance, CNN reported that a young girl, who was an average student in high school, had a low CGPA in her first semester after returning from her study break. In conclusion, there are both pros and cons in taking a year out of school after high school. This can be beneficial to students who learned some life experiences, and those who made their career choices. Nevertheless, this can be detrimental to those who could not return to school, as well as those who found it difficult to readapt to learning setting.