An Honors College That Honors Grit

"Tyreek works full-time in the sanitation department while co-parenting his 10-year-old son. Ahjoni, a cancer survivor, was enduring a chemotherapy regimen. Mohammad was kicked out of prep school, then suspended for 100 days from high school for, among other things, selling chocolate to his classmates. Emanuel was serving a three-year sentence for armed robbery when a jury tossed out his conviction.

These are not the profiles of students who get admitted to a classic university-run honors college. Instead, they are enrolled at the Honors Living-Learning Community of Rutgers University-Newark, an institution where they and others with similarly fraught life stories are pushing the boundaries of what defines an honors college by emphasizing grit in overcoming life’s difficulties, rather than grades." …

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/opinion/honors-college-rutgers.html