HOME AWAY FROM HOME Landon C. White graduated from high school in Denver last spring and is taking a year off in France. Ed Alcock for The New York Times

Another good one from the New York Times:

By Alex Williams By the time she graduated from high school, Sabrina Skau needed a break. She was 18. She was exhausted.

While high school passes with the plodding pace of a marathon for some students, Ms. Skau, who graduated from David Douglas High School in Portland, Ore., last June, approached it more like a 26-mile sprint. Setting her sights on admission to college, she took three college-level Latin courses at Portland State University the summer after eighth grade. Through her senior year, she barely stopped for breath, as hours of oboe practice and band competitions crowded into hours of after-school volunteer work.

By the end, she barely stumbled over the finish line.

“I had always been so excited to go to college, but over senior year I simply started to get burned out,” she said in an e-mail message. “By the summertime it was evident that I was not looking forward to going back to school. That was something that frightened both my parents and me.”

So Ms. Skau took a step that would have seemed shocking a year before: she said no to college — at least for a year.

Ms. Skau, who is now teaching English in Argentina, is among a growing number of high-achieving students who are contemplating a year off before college — known as a gap year — as a release from mounting pressures to gain admittance to top colleges.

The article goes on to tell the tales of other students taking a "gap year" before college. Some schools are even holding gap-year fairs to show options for students on how to spend their time off.

QUESTION: Are you going straight to college? Or are you taking a year?

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