November 1 marks the deadline for early decision/early action applications to college for this year’s high school graduating class. Acceptance into college, at least for a time, seems to indicate your value as a human being, and the college you choose will mold you into the person you will become.

But not all of these seniors should go to college. At least, not yet. More students need to consider gap years. A gap year is a year of unregulated freedom, taken off from academics usually between high school graduation and college enrollment.

After I got into Northwestern as part of the class of 2012, I deferred admission. I spent six months earning money, then hopped on a plane to Kiev, Ukraine to meet a girl with whom I had exchanged four emails. I worked as an English teacher in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine among Peace Corps volunteers for seven months. When I returned to the States, I used videos I had filmed and edited in my spare time to land a position as an in-house editor for a local film production company.

It was not an easy or carefree year. I supported myself entirely, as my parents and I had agreed when I told them I wasn’t going to college right away. I found that living away from home for the first time in a country where you don’t speak the language is both physically and emotionally exhausting.

But those 365 days made all the difference in my freshman year.

College success requires a certain amount of maturity, a certain amount of individuation you need to have before your egg-crate pad hits your moldy mattress. I didn’t have this maturity coming out of high school. Nor did I have what I now feel all college freshmen need: a humble sense of self-responsibility.

Not all graduated high school seniors need time to mature. Even though she’s more than a year younger than the standard freshman, Medill freshman Kaitlyn Jakola barely notices a difference between her maturity level and that of those around her. She says she feels prepared “because I’ve had these past five years to get acclimated to the age difference between myself and my peers.” And not everyone takes a gap year or two to gain maturity. Medill junior Bryan West transferred to Northwestern as a sophomore, but deferred admission for a year to pursue a job that prepared him for his future career.

But extra time won’t hurt. Universities like Duke and Harvard regularly encourage students to grow for another year before enrolling. They argue that more mature students are better students, and with age comes maturity.

But it’s more than that. College — especially Northwestern — is expensive. Appreciation for the classes, teachers, knowledge and money invested in your education can often come from and increase with a year or more spent in the real world.

If you live in America and come from a certain socioeconomic background, college is an expectation. Society tells you this is how you succeed. Society is wrong. Sometimes, anyway. There are a thousand paths to success, and many of them don’t involve non-stop education.

Students can be mature and prepared for college at a younger age, but I believe many more will be better prepared — and better students — if they take time away from school. Everyone I’ve met who has taken a gap year has the same sentiments: “one of the best decisions I’ve made,” West says. In general, those that step off the well-worn path often find the rewards they want with less stress than others.