If at First They Don't Succeed...

Students use an increasingly popular 'gap year' strategy to increase their chances of being admitted to elite institutions

When the letters from colleges arrived in Matthew Savage Aibel's mailbox in the spring of 2004, he was not thrilled with the news. Despite his 1420 SAT score and good grades, the most-competitive colleges to which he had applied, including Georgetown University and Yale University, rejected him. Hamilton College, a selective college that accepts only about a third

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