Malia, Mitch ... and Stu

Had I known letting your child take a year off before starting college would generate so much publicity, I would have written about it already.

The Obamas decided such a few weeks back, and it’s now the media rage. Daughter Malia has been accepted to Harvard. But instead of starting next fall, she will wait a year.

Their untraditional choice got them into Forbes, L.A. Times, The Guardian and a host of other lead international media.

The Frankos did it last year.

We just got strange looks.

When we decided last year, the catalyst was hockey and my son, Mitchell’s, interest in playing that sport somewhere in college.

Hockey is an odd sport in that it thrives mainly outside of the traditional structure of high-school athletics.

“Junior hockey,” as it is called, is as much a sports factory as is high-school football around here. The Youngstown Phantoms are the elite level of junior hockey, with those players going to the best Division 1 scholarship programs in the country. Athletes can play in that structure until age 20. College coaches favor that because it allows them to stable talent until that age. A 20-year-old freshman is better for a program than a 17-year-old freshman.

So good of a process is it (for colleges at least), that even Division 3 colleges – if football, think places like Westminster, Geneva or Thiel – employ the stabling system. If you want to play varsity college hockey even at D3 level, you’re more than likely to have to toil down the extended junior path.

So hockey pulled us in to the idea of stalling college. But I also liked it for the life experience.

It was chance to pause and ponder.

How ready for college is an 18-year-old?

Some teens and families are, and God bless them. But I would offer that most teens are not.

In my 25-year newspaper career, new college grads have been about 85 percent of my job-candidate recruiting base. Of those hundreds upon hundreds of job applicants in the four states I’ve called home, I’d guess that 70 percent of them either changed majors, took off a semester or year to regroup, flunked out for a bit, or stayed an extra semester or year due to different credits needed caused by their switch. I’ve watched our job applicants more closely the last few years as our boys neared their own such decision – and I think it’s at about 85 percent.

The year away allowed our son to tweak his major a bit. I hope it was enough to at least spare him one lost semester or year – had he switched while being in school.

As for life lessons, he lived in a new city and a new part of the country. He lived with relatives. He worked and managed his own money for gas, food, repairs, etc. He suffered a mid-level injury and had to largely act on his own behalf with physicians (with Dad on the phone).

His best life lesson of the time was probably his worst moment of the year – when he took his aged vehicle beyond the distance Dad told him to take it (and without letting Dad know). On that trip, in the middle of Boston six hours from his home and with a van full of teammates, the god of paybacks reached out and disabled the van. A parent who was in another vehicle on that trip and had stopped to help said it was the most sickly look she’d seen on a teen when she said, “Your dad doesn’t know you have the van in Boston? Call him now.”

For life, it was a productive year. For hockey, it was a grind. By March, he’d decided his 19th year of life would not be spent on bad trips to Boston like his 18th year. He dropped the thought of “college hockey” and decided on just “college.”

I learned from the Obamas’ publicity that this is called “a gap year.” I had no idea.

When I was in college – we just called it “Stu.” He was the beer buddy who’d been an undergrad for eight years.

For us last year, it was just us making a family decision and getting weird looks because people looked at it as a foolish hockey-only pursuit.

We worked with Youngstown State University folks right from the get-go so as to preserve his scholarship opportunities and other such normalcies of the typical college freshman. The ability to preserve such scholarships is school-specific and linked mainly to the enrollment competition. At Ohio State, for example, it’s a tougher chance to preserve your funds due to the thick applicant pool. On one college message board, College Confidential, a student in 2013 wrote they wanted to take a gap year. The school reportedly told them the $15,000 in scholarship funds they were awarded would not be guaranteed if they took off a year.

That message board has plenty of great tales of gap-year decisions.

Another surprise of the Obama gap-year publicity is the thousands upon thousands of dollars wealthy families spend to send a teen off for something productive during a gap year – up to $50,000 I saw in one story.

I think in this era of social networking, that’s just a foolish expense. We had four diverse cities and several job ideas lined up just by putting out feelers with family and friends. And we likely would have done this even without hockey as a catalyst. And even if he stayed home, I would have loved for him to spend a year with Purple Cat or Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp. or the like – morally significant situations.

If you are in the market for gap-year advice and are about to spend thousands of dollars on a consultant, I will offer my services for few bucks and a couple of beers.

I don’t think the Obamas will have any problem with gap-year options, and they’re probably not worrying about scholarships.

That aside, it’s cool company nonetheless – Mitch, Malia ... And Stu.

Todd Franko is editor of The Vindicator. He likes emails about stories and our newspaper. Email him at tfranko@vindy.com. He blogs, too, on Vindy.com. Tweet him, too, at @tfranko.