Abby Falik on Why The Gap Year Deserves a Rebrand and Empowering Our Youth To Fly

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In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Tom Vander Ark interviews Abby Falik, founder of The Flight School, a transformative educational initiative aimed at high school graduates. The Flight School offers an innovative “launch year,” encouraging young adults to step beyond traditional educational paths, explore personal passions, and engage in aligned work that addresses world needs. The program emphasizes experiential learning, global immersion, and self-discovery, distinguishing itself from the typical gap year by fostering skills such as resilience, empathy, and agency.

During the conversation, Falik articulates the importance of redefining success and education in a rapidly evolving world, aiming to prepare a generation of leaders equipped to navigate and contribute to a future shaped by global challenges and opportunities. The Flight School’s model, designed for scalability, seeks to involve a million students by 2035, making the experience accessible to diverse youth worldwide. Falik invites listeners to support and participate in expanding this vision, highlighting the broader societal shift towards valuing personal and communal impact over conventional academic achievements.

Outline

• (04:16) The Concept of a Launch Year
• (06:55) Components of the Flight School Program
• (14:25) Skills and Community Building
• (23:44) Scaling the Flight School Vision

Tom Vander Ark: With prescriptive learning, outdated assessments, and narrow definitions of success, we’re teaching kids to follow the leader. What if instead we taught them to fly? I’m Tom Vander Ark and you’re listening to Getting Smart Podcast, and we are thrilled to have with us the founder of the Flight School, our friend, Abby Falik.

Hi, Abby.

Abby Falik: Hi, Tom. I’m so happy to be here.

Tom Vander Ark: I just love that intro on your website. Your website is really beautiful, by the way.

Abby Falik: With thanks to my very creative colleagues, I feel so fortunate to be working with such talented people.

Tom Vander Ark: It is articulate, beautiful, and compelling. The intro really lays out the problem that you’re trying to solve. We just have a formal education system that isn’t up to the current task. So tell us about the Flight School. What is it? Who’s it for? How does it work?

Abby Falik: I appreciate, Tom, you starting with the website because we thought long and hard about how to send the right signal. For me, it began from a deep-felt sense that the way we are continuing to train what we now call excellent sheep, marching in lockstep, heads down, gathering gold stars, checking boxes, believing that there’s a narrow path, waiting for permission to proceed and paying attention if this will be on the test. And then this vision for the Flight School started emerging before we had a name for it. I was in a session with a mentor who was essentially saying what’s the opposite of what you’re trying to do?

And I said it’s really this sort of lockstep excellent sheep herd mentality. And she said what’s the opposite of that? And I said, it’s beautiful birds taking flight. It’s the process of recognizing that we can pause, look up and leap that if we take space to orient before we begin again, that we’re actually moving toward a far horizon deliberately and not just racing in somebody else’s hurry.

Tom Vander Ark: Smiling because you have a flock of birds taking, they’re on, there’s a graph showing your impact and it’s a flock of birds. So I love that.

It’s the flightschool.org, right?

Abby Falik: Yes, exactly. And I remember dreams throughout childhood of being able to fly. I think that’s a common dream that we have, but there’s a sense of freedom and courage that meet in the free fall. And I’ve just been drawn to the sky for as long as I can remember. The changing weather, the changing light, the sense of possibility. And our mission at the Flight School is to equip an entire generation with the skills and orientation they need to navigate the sky. Not just follow the maps that direct us to a world that doesn’t even exist anymore.

Tom Vander Ark: No, that’s beautiful.

The Concept of a Launch Year

Tom Vander Ark: So in the old days, we would have thought of this as a gap year, but you call it a, you’ve renamed it a launch year.

Abby Falik: The gap year terminology has been so detrimental. If you think about what a gap is, it’s a metaphor that suggests you’re falling into a hole that you may or may not come out of, or that this year is the absence of learning. And in my experience of now two decades working with young adults, that year, when done by design, not by default when it’s deliberate and intentional, can actually be the set of experiences that fill in the gaps left by our traditional education.

So we’re calling it a launch year and believe that it is the opportunity for a rebellious rite of passage that helps orient young people to a better understanding of who they are, what the world needs, and what their role can be.

Tom Vander Ark: It’s designed for high school graduates. Does it replace postsecondary learning, or is it a period to design a path that may or may not include postsecondary learning? How do you think about the purpose?

Abby Falik: I would say TBD in terms of exactly where our fellows end up next. In the earlier iteration of this idea, I built and led an organization called Global Citizen Year. And for a dozen years there, it was very clear to me that the next step was college. I got early input from advisers and parents that as soon as we suggested that college was not the goal, that we would lose most people, and it always felt a little bit constraining to me, but I was happy to play along. I do believe that historically, college has been an essential next step for so many young people and preparing them for careers and economic mobility. But increasingly, I am convinced that’s no longer true, and I am sensing that the world is going to change.

Catching up to that. So if we do our job well at the Flight School, we’re helping young people develop skills that help them navigate life and whatever form their higher education takes. So I anticipate many will end up in college and they’ll do so on purpose. They’ll know why they’re there. They’ll have a set of questions that they’re looking to answer.

They’ll be on a mission, not just there to fulfill a major. And if they opt out of traditional higher ed, I have full confidence that they will design a course of learning that aligns with who they are and what they’re here to do.

Components of the Flight School Program

Tom Vander Ark: Let’s walk through the components of Flight School. Your website explains it. It’s leave home, do some aligned work, rest and retreat, and participate in the Flight School community. I’d like to have you talk about each one of those. The first, and I think foundational element of this is to leave home for a year and go somewhere that feels foreign to you.

Why are you so committed to that idea?

Abby Falik: Religions and cultures and countries and communities around the world have honored this life stage between childhood and adulthood, high school, and what comes next with rites of passage, historically. And we have lost sight of that completely. We pretend that there is no space between one stage and the next.

And we do that to the detriment of young people and the world in many ways. We send kids racing at a sprint toward someone else’s finish line. And so the insight, and I’ve been a deep student of rites of passage, transformative, experiential learning, global immersion, as it can help us shape our perspective, both on ourselves and the broader world, the insight is that a formative experience beyond your comfort zone at that age and stage when it’s scaffolded with the right supports, a community coach, a curriculum that you follow can lead to the kind of learning that matters most. The earlier organization I led, Global Citizen Year, provided immersive experiences and apprenticeships for young people who finished high school and would spend eight months living and working in communities across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

And the experience was wildly transformative, but also precious in both the good and bad senses of that term. It was enormously resource-intensive to support each student and find their place where they lived and the place where they worked. We were in charge of all the health and safety and bought all of the health insurance and the plane tickets.

And what I realized working with thousands of young people through that process was that so much of the transformation, the insight, the learning, the inner development happened independent of some of those other things that we were spending so much time and money to set up. So the insight for me has been, what if we can separate out the core components that lead to a transformative rite of passage, but not own and operate them programmatically in the same way.

So at the Flight School, what we’re offering is the scaffolding. We have called young people in from around the world to join us in a year-long launch year process, where we help them define an animating question, develop a plan for how they’re going to explore it out in the world. They have access to what we call a night sky fund, where they can apply for resources to support their exploration and their experiential learning.

And then they come together periodically as a group to connect and reflect on the experience. And I’m happy to share more about any part of that. But the idea is that this is a deeply self-directed experience where you are accompanied by a cohort, by guides, by our reimagined faculty. And the opportunity is to scale to the size of a generation, to make it normative that young people anywhere take a year like this to ask and sit with the bigger questions about their lives.

Tom Vander Ark: You invite them to find or create aligned work. That seems like an important part.

Abby Falik: Yeah. I think so often young people, and then all of us really are jumping through hoops. We take the classes in the course catalog that line up to a major. We take the internship that we think is going to get us the next job, but what we’re trying to do is hit reset and help young people listen more deeply.

To what they are deeply and truly curious about. What gets you up when there’s no alarm clock? What do you choose to study when it’s not on the syllabus? Who are your teachers really when they’re not the people at the front of the room who happen to have been assigned to you? So in many ways, we are decomposing an education and decoupling learning from schooling and helping young people become what we believe are truly good students, which is having the ability to learn from any context.

Tom Vander Ark: I’ve come to believe that given the change in the world that one of the most important skills for young people is opportunity recognition or problem finding. Finding important work to do, work that’s important to you and to your community. And there are a few systems that point to this in their portrait of a graduate.

They might call it self-direction or learner agency. A few of them might mention problem finding. But you really have the most expansive approach. A year of invitation to find work that matters. And I guess that’s my favorite thing about this is the, it is a bold and brave invitation with a lot of space. And to do the opposite of what they’ve been doing for 12 years, where they’ve been given small problems with right answers. To find a big problem without an answer in a place, a foreign context. And so these first two elements of leaving home and then doing aligned work are beautiful. And I think they’re scary.

Abby Falik: Oh, it’s so scary. That’s why we talk about flight, learning to fly, learning to leave home, finding your wings and your flock and having the support you need on that first flight. There’s such an emphasis for us on carrying the question without the need to answer it. And it is, as you’re saying, the antithesis of how schooling and then society are set up, where we prize the knowing and deprecate not knowing. But my experience and conviction is that the thing that we are most in need of and lacking societally is an ability to sit with ambiguity and discomfort. and not bounce out of it. And there are more opportunities than there have ever been for us to numb ourselves out and distract ourselves with social media feeds and the onslaught from all the digital fire hoses coming our way that can hijack our attention and take us somewhere else.

It all trains us to be uncomfortable with change, with fear, with emotions we don’t like, with boredom, with uncertainty. And so in so many ways, setting young people out into an open sky with some scaffolds and some supports is very much an exercise in learning an essential skill for navigating a world that has never changed this fast and will never change this slowly again.

Skills and Community Building

Tom Vander Ark: You invite your participants into the Flight School community. What is that? What will it become?

Abby Falik: So we launched this year, we are midway through a pilot year of the Flight School. Our team is nimble, lean, tiny, and just operating with a sense of how much can we throw out and learn and how can we co-create this experience with the participants themselves. The kind of sequencing here was we put a call out to educators, superintendents, heads of school, leads of charter school networks and leadership programs around the world.

Ask them to identify young people in their communities who were nearing the end of high school, who were disillusioned by the state of the world and determined to do something about it, but who didn’t know where to start. And we were looking for kids who were not necessarily academic superstars, though plenty of them have been.

We were more interested in young people who were ambitious on their own terms, who had been resourceful and started something from scratch or who had inspired their peers to follow them in some way. And we were really careful to screen for participants who we felt were running toward what we offer as opposed to away from something else.

So we led a selection process in the first year of anything. I imagine what it would have taken to be in the first year of the Peace Corps or Teach for America. It’s a very particular subset, right? These are There’s a self-assuredness and a sort of draw to something that’s very unknown. And we just found ourselves with the most inspired, courageous, and committed cohort of young people who we’re calling our co-pilots, who are helping us test various hypotheses we had about what might work and refine it very quickly for what’s possible. So the community they join is with each other. We have fellows from 16 countries in our pilot. They are accompanied by a set of guides who are near peers to them, who are some paces further down the path, who are there to coach and support and mentor them. And then we have a few dozen folks signed on as what we call reimagined faculty.

They are not academics with PhDs, though some of them may have PhDs. They are disruptive practitioners. They are people whose inner life and outer work are deeply aligned and coherent and who preach only what they already practice. And so we surround these young people, we’re calling them fellows, with wise accompaniment to help them find and build the courage to leave home, to find themselves in the stretch zone, to reflect rigorously, and to begin again.

Tom Vander Ark: Again, your website talks about a set of skills that you try to develop. You call them real skills, resilience, empathy, agency, and leadership. That’s a beautiful list. Is the participation in the community in part some skill-building around those aspects?

Abby Falik: Absolutely. Yeah. We’re quite focused on the skills that we believe matter most in the world as it is today. And one of the frameworks we’re playing with, and this is all very emergent still, is thinking about our world that is increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence. And it strikes me that we it rolls off the tongue at this point AI, artificial intelligence, but let’s just pause for a moment on the artificial of that, which helps me remember that what we’re doing is focusing on what’s authentic.

What are the skills and capabilities that are authentically human and always will be? I’m going to say, I used to think they were empathy and agency. I’m not as sure anymore, given what we’ve seen about what AI can already do. So we’re reorienting around a set of skills that require human capabilities and consciousness. We’re thinking about intuition. How do you hone your sense of your inner knowing, your ability to listen to the sound of what is true in you when you tune out all the other noise? We’re talking about discernment. Recently, I’ve been using this word a lot and Googled what is discernment really? It said, it’s not the difference between right and wrong. It’s knowing the difference between right and almost right. Which I love. Thinking about compassion. So it’s the interconnection between all of us. It’s the understanding that our fates are deeply entwined, that we need to be able to connect across difference in ways that inspire us to act on behalf of all of us. And courage. Which I don’t think is anything that’s going to be taken from humans anytime soon, but it’s absolutely what we need to be cultivating. And I think we’re really at risk of doing the opposite by continuing to train young people in old systems for a world that doesn’t exist anymore.

Tom Vander Ark: This brings me to the fourth component of your program. We talked about leaving home, doing aligned work, participating in the Flight School community. The third one that I skipped over is rest, retreat, reflect. The skills that you just described sound to me like things that require reflection.

Is that why that rest and retreat is important?

Abby Falik: Yes, exactly. And we’ve learned so much this year already about how much time it takes to decondition so much of the speed and the learning and the orientation when you’re shot out the cannon at the end of the high school trajectory. And so in future years, we’ve gotten really clear that rest and retreat is going to happen at the front end of the experience.

And we’re going to have frameworks around what that looks like. There’s an element that’s about unplugging from technology with some really clear parameters and intentions. We’re bringing in really wise elders and youngers to teach us about deep and reflective rest and what that looks like.

And some of this has been the most radical part of what we’re offering up. And we’re getting feedback that it’s actually some of the most transformative as well to just even acknowledge what stories you’ve been told about rest. To rest when you’re dead. Or that it’s lazy to slow down or don’t, don’t you dare adjust your the speed you’ll get off track or get behind.

And it just couldn’t be clearer to me from my own experience. We talk a lot about the power of the pause. And it’s obviously embedded in this notion of a pause between high school and what comes next. But I think of the power of the pause as a bit of a fractal framework where, the more quiet we get, the more clear we are that there is power in the pause between an action and a reaction between one day and the next one week and the next one year and the next.

And so a component of the Flight School is learning to pause and providing resources and access for young people anywhere to either self-design some form of real deep retreat in nature or in a spiritual or religious setting if that’s what appeals to them but to do it in ways that create a reset changes everything about how we approach what comes next.

Tom Vander Ark: All right. Back to your website. One of the compelling graphics on your website is the four domains of Ikigai, and I love how it describes traditional school as getting at the, what I’m good at and what I can get paid for and the Flight School is really about what I love and what the world needs that this is really a beautiful complement to traditional and formal education that really does get at what I call work that matters work that you love that’s important to you and important to the world to your community.

Abby Falik: Tom, I think what excites me most about this moment of opportunity where so much of what we’ve trained humans to do in the world is being done now by robots and will increasingly be done by artificial intelligence, is that focusing on what you love and what the world needs is no longer a luxury.

It’s actually our shared birthright and responsibility. And so where I think this kind of work has been cast aside in the past as a nice to have once we get test scores above a certain level or once we get graduation college graduation rates up by X percentage, I think very quickly, we’re going to see a sort of general consensus emerge, that the power skills of the future, that the work that matters most, is helping young people discern who they are uniquely, what their gifts are, and how they can apply them in a way that really has an impact on what the world needs.

Scaling the Flight School Vision

Tom Vander Ark: You have big aspirations for this. I think your website shares a goal of a million kids involved in a Flight School experience by 2035. It feels like a pretty scalable model. All the components that we talked about feel like something that, where that goal is actually doable.

Abby Falik: I’m so happy to hear you say that. I agree completely. And that’s why we’re building it this way. We are scaling we’re building with scale in mind. And it’s been my experience as a social entrepreneur that so often we design things and then we’re trying to take what works to scale.

And we’re approaching this from a very different perspective, which is let’s figure out what works at scale. As opposed to scaling what works and we, yes, need to get the core of it but every design choice we’re making is about what does this look like to catch the young person in every high school on the planet, who would look up and take this leap with us if we approach them in the right way.

That’s what we are after here. I feel like the moment demands it. And that’s the model we’re designing.

Tom Vander Ark: Are you looking for the top the high-flying president of the class valedictorian, or are you looking for the young person whose leadership is yet to emerge? Who’s this most going to benefit?

Abby Falik: For those who are looking for us. We have recognized that it’s a set of young people who may be in either of those categories. They may well be the ones who were not interested in school because it wasn’t aligned with the way that they learn best. But we’ve got a huge, a huge interest as well from kids who’ve been highly academic and succeeding on traditional measures, but reach the end of this first stage of things.

And they’re skeptical about what this is all for. They may have gotten into the college of their dreams and feel some sense of hollowness and a question about why they’re running this race or the sense of, I know I’m going to college because it’s been expected of me, but do I know why I’m going and what I hope to do with the experience.

We’ve got, we have an orientation right now about being open to those who are open to us. And in addition to the fellowship, which will be a more select group of students where we’ll invest additional resources, and they’ve got access to add-on funding that we’re building a global community that can scale to millions of young people who want to opt in.

Tom Vander Ark: I do think the world’s ready for you. The United States parents in particular really come to think differently about higher education and are really frustrated with both the cost and the quality and I think are widely aware of the problems with pushing kids into college without a clear sense of purpose. So I’m not sure that the Flight School would have taken flight 10 years ago but it does feel like the world is ready for you. Am I right that that organized as a nonprofit and trying to make this free or very low cost to the participants that donors could be helpful?

Abby Falik: You are correct. So we raise a night sky fund that allocates up to $10,000 in funding per fellow to participate. And that’s need-based funding. And we’re also committed to making the Flight School tuition-free. So we want this to be open access to young people who are most committed to this process and opportunity.

With some expectation that they find ways of paying it forward. With time and resources and social capital over time. It just feels like a, we’re building a generosity network here and we are looking for a few partners, major benefactors who understand the vision of what’s possible here and want to co-create it with us.

Tom Vander Ark: We’d really encourage our listeners to consider that option. Abby where can they learn more about how they could help, how they could participate in scaling the Flight School? Thank you.

Abby Falik: At theflightschool.org is our website. And if you’re interested in hearing more from me you can follow me, Abby Falik, on LinkedIn. Planning to launch a Substack in the new year called Taking Flight. And. There will be a growing number of opportunities for people to get involved philanthropically as volunteers, as guides, as members of this reimagined faculty.

And I would just encourage, parents and educators who are listening to recognize the role that we play in having the courage to look up and beyond the way that we did school to see that the world has changed and that we owe it to the rising generation to encourage them to explore new and more expansive paths.

Tom Vander Ark: Abby it feels like another helpful response might be to begin to incorporate into postsecondary planning that many schools do, starting with maybe even an eighth grade. This, the idea of a launch year following high school, are you ready for us to do that?

Abby Falik: Yes, please. I would love to hear from people who are interested in partnering there. We are very clear that part of changing the culture around this year, becoming more normative requires partnering with high schools. And even before we’re going to experiment with offering elements of our courses and a particular approach to teaching.

Connecting young people in communities of practice that help them rethink what they thought was true about success and achievement and education and leadership and happiness and time, all of these things. We are planning to offer components of that to students who are still in high school as a way of giving them a taste for what learning in the Flight School can feel like. And I’d love to get to a world where part of a graduation requirement from high school is that you’ve got your launch year plan or that you’ve at least thought it through. And as we build out our community of opportunities and placements and homestays and organizations that you could learn from and work with around the world, we’d love to be the place that young people come to create those plans.

Tom Vander Ark: It’s a beautiful thing. Abby Falik is the founder of the Flight School. It’s a launch year. I hope each of you that are parents discuss this with your students. If you’re in a position to support the program, Abby would appreciate your support. Abby, what a cool and timely new chapter.

The Flight School feels like the right experience at the right time to really help cultivate cadres of global leaders. Just enough structure and just enough openness to opportunity recognition, to problem finding we’re really excited about what you’re doing.

We love how you’re doing it. Love that you’re co-creating the program with a brave group of pilot students. So thanks to you and your team. We really respect you as a person and innovator and go. Go Flight School.

Abby Falik: Thank you, Tom. So grateful.

Tom Vander Ark: Best in the new year. Thanks to Abby for being with us today. Also, thanks to Mason Pasha, our producer and the whole Getting Smart team that makes this possible. Until next time, keep learning, keep leading, and keep innovating for equity. See you next time.

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Abby Falik

Abby Falik is a globally recognized social entrepreneur, speaker, and seeker. 

Her work reimagines how we learn and lead in a world that’s never changed this fast, but will never change this slowly again. She thrives at the interfaces — where fields cross-pollinate, where inner growth drives outer impact, and where ancient wisdom shapes future flourishing.

Named one of Fast Company’s “Most Creative People” and to Goldman Sachs’ list of “Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs,” Abby’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, NPR, and PBS. She contributes regularly to global conversations at forums like the Aspen Institute, Milken Institute, and Obama Foundation.

Abby is insatiably curious about life’s thresholds — the pivotal moments “on the cusp” when everything is possible and nothing is yet determined. For two decades, she’s been drawn to perhaps the most powerful threshold of all: the transition to adulthood.

In 2008, after winning Harvard’s Pitch for Change, Abby founded Global Citizen Year, an acclaimed Fellowship that reimagined the “gap year” through an accessible, global immersion.  As CEO, she raised and deployed over $65M in scholarships, shaping the trajectory of thousands of emerging leaders. 

In 2022, she joined the Emerson Collective as an Entrepreneur in Residence to create a blueprint for scaling this impact to the size of a generation. As part of her exploration, she spent the year practicing what she’d preached about learning on purpose from radical educational models around the world with her family (and just three carry-on bags) in tow.

These insights and experiences led her to found The Flight School in 2024 with her cofounder, Chalon Bridges.  Combining ancient wisdom with pioneering technologies, The Flight School reinvents the transition after high school as a rebellious rite of passage—connecting rising leaders to the people, power, and purpose they need to change the world, for good.

Abby currently serves on the Advisory Boards of Harvard Business School and People First, and is a visiting Fellow at Stanford University. She holds degrees from Stanford (BA/M.Ed) and Harvard Business School (MBA).

She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband Joel and two young sons, Rio and Luca.

In another lifetime, she’d be a forest monk, a rabbi, or rockstar. In this one, she’s committed to anything (and anyone) that helps her become more human in a world becoming less so.

Links

• Watch the full video here
• Abby Falik 
• The Flight School
• Previous Podcast with Abby
• Abby’s Substack