It is true that taking a gap year for traveling or working is becoming widespread nowadays. While I acknowledge that having a one year break before continuing study at university brings a number of benefits, I personally believe the disadvantages are more significant.
On the one hand, there is no doubt that taking a gap year provides a multiple of merits. Firstly, spending time traveling after graduating from high school will help seniors refresh their mind and reduce stress after they accomplish the final university entrance exam. Others take full advantage of gap year to work part time. This reason can understandable because there are several students who want to earn money to help their family or they want to be financially independent before entering the first year of college. Beside that, there are a few students not really ready for starting a new environment of studying, they want to explore themselves or even grow social skills like communication skills, teamwork efficiency or organization ability because they think that these factors are important for learning in college.
On the other hand, taking a gap year brings numerous drawbacks rather than benefits. If anyone chooses to have a rest year after graduation, they will fall behind composed to peers. Their old friends or others of the same age have studied a lot of new knowledges meanwhile the people who choose gap year will be under peers pressure because they lose one year to do personal purposes and when they return to study, they will hardly follow their old friends. In addition, if you take a gap year, you may miss many chances to get a scholarship which is considered one of the big opportunities which can help numerous students in university to career goals such as finance, having a great chance to study abroad.
In conclusion, people should accept that taking a rest year to travel or work part time before starting to go to college again after graduation from high school has more disadvantages than advantages owing to wastefulness of time and money. Moreover, your academic achievements will be significantly reduced though it has some notable benefits.