There has been handful of posts about this in the past but I didn’t see anything recent. Posting to get updated knowledge base on these Honors college. Please share your experiences with these schools.
My daughter has been accepted to both honors college and will be pursing a Neuroscience degree on the Pre-Med track. Any thoughts whether an honors college would be a good path to pursue given the already demanding course load?
accepted to U of Arizona Honors
accepted to Ohio State
accepted to Pitt (awaiting honors decision)
UMD (awaiting decision)
ASU honors is an older program and very well respected. I think it is considered a top tier school contained within ASU, so congrats on that acceptance. We chose not to apply- UA just seemed smaller and more manageable. ASU is spread out with different campuses. I have not gotten the sense that UA’s honors program is a lot of extra work.
UA’s honors college is newer and still making it’s mark, I think. We haven’t visited and are really trying to find out more about it. From the website and YouTube videos it looks very nice, and a few people here on CC that have visited have seemed impressed. one concern I have is whether it’s too full of in-state kids (not to say there is anything wrong with Arizona kids…).
As a pre-med, I don’t think any of the prestige issues matter. you need to be happy where you go and get good grades. BUT- you also need opportunities for clinical experiences. I don’t think ASU has a med school, but UA does. maybe that matters but I am not sure. It’s widely known that Pitt is hard to beat for pre-med stuff, but it’s pretty urban and maybe that’s not what your kid wants.
If you are in-state for Maryland or VA, those schools are great and it’s not worth more $ to go to other state schools, but I suspect you got decent merit $ from Arizona…
My daughter, by the way, is not pre-med. thinking more poly-sci and government, maybe pre-law.
As previously mentioned, ASU is well respected. It and U of SC are considered the top Honors.
But I will tell you that Honors is for the student experience. It’s not going to help with jobs or grad school.
U of As facility is awesome. I want to move in. Great dorm, dining hall on the bottom and a gym and counseling center adjacent.
ASU is huge - but as an MBA alum I managed fine. U of A is much more contained, smaller etc.
Pitt, you needn’t be in Honors to take Honors classes.
Choose the right school for you. If Honors helps your experience, then it’s great.
If you want Honors purely for the prestige or the outcomes, that’s not a reason to choose a school. Sure it could help - if you get tight with a prof, but a non honors could have that too.
Good luck
Ps For premed, you definitely want to save $$ if you can unless your last name is Buffet or Bezos.
We live in AZ and I took D24 on campus tours in July & Oct to ASU and U of A. We went on the honors college tours at both schools. Don’t have any experience in our family as a student attending either school. D24 is interested in pre-med. But our impressions of the 2 honors colleges was as follows:
ASU:
larger honors college complex. Dorm can house more students.
honors students required to live on campus 2 yr.
D24 liked the dorm room lay out.
it was ~8-10 min walk from the Tempe campus student union to the honors college dorm.
Tempe campus is very spread out. Really immense. We parked in a parking lot on the other end of campus and the honors college tour was at the end of the day. It took us a REALLY long time to get back to the car.
not all majors are offered at the main Tempe campus. Some of the health sciences/pre-med-focused majors are only at the downtown campus. This was a big negative for D24.
ASU has a bus that shuttles people between all 4 campuses. From Tempe to the downtown campus one way, you should allot about 45 min.
each campus does have dorms and a dining hall. We’ve been to robotics competitions at the Polytech campus in Mesa and I can definitively report that THAT campus is dead as a doornail on weekends…literally no one around (clearly, a commuter campus) and there’s nothing to do w/in walking distance of the Polytech campus.
honors students get priority registration. Very helpful given that total student body size at ASU is at about 63,000 students total.
D24 didn’t like that there didn’t seem to be anywhere grassy underneath trees for students to hang out. She also noticed that there weren’t a whole lot of places outside to actually sit (benches, tables) that she noticed on the regular campus tour.
hardly any shade. This was a big negative for D24.
classrooms in the honors dorm building, so that’s helpful if any of your freshman year honors seminar classes are in there…just go downstairs instead of hiking 20 min across campus.
honors college administration offices are in the honors dorm building complex.
$1000/semester extra fee for the honors college.
U of A:
1 campus instead of 4. Campus a lot more compact. D24 liked this a lot more.
all majors at the same campus
there’s a campus shuttle that goes all around campus and also makes stops at University Medical Center, which is helpful if you have an internship there (our tour guide did)
on campus map, the honors college dorm building looks really far away, but walking-wise, it’s really not.
like ASU’s Tempe campus honors dorm, U of A’s honors dorm building has a dining hall in it for only honors students to use. We were there on a Saturday and there was lots of activity. Also students hanging out in the honors dorm front reception area.
there’s a rec center right next to the honors dorm. Has a smoothie bar in it, which was a big plus in D24’s eyes.
like ASU, also has a couple of classrooms on 1st floor of honors dorm building.
like ASU, also has the honors college administration offices in the honors dorm building.
honors tour guide mentioned that there’s a summer study abroad option for honors freshman students to do the summer after their freshman year. Apparently there are scholarships you can apply for to help pay for that. No idea what the application requirements for that are, though.
D24 liked the dorm room layout here also.
not as many honors dorm building rooms available compared to ASU
same honors college perks as ASU, including priority registration.
our regular campus tour guide was an honors pre-med student. We asked about class sizes. She said her largest class was a freshman year chemistry lecture, which had about 300 students in it. Forgot to ask same question when we were on the ASU tour.
D24 liked how the campus felt like it had a lot more green space with trees and shaded areas to sit under and hang out compared to ASU. But what one person is looking for in terms of ‘vibe’ is entirely different than another person.
there’s an extra honors college fee, but much less than ASU.
U of A has had an honors college for quite awhile, but it was just a couple of years ago that they added a separate honors dorm building set aside entirely for honors students. Previously, the honors dorm options were floors of regular dorms. All of the rest of its honors college stuff already existed.
D24 has decided to apply to U of A and is going to skip ASU entirely.
For most kids the college to pick is the one they’d want to attend if they left the premed track since the attrition rate is tremendous. Only about 40% of those completing all the requirements and taking the MCAT get in, and for every one that goes that far there were probably 2 or 3 others that started frosh year thinking of pre-med at many colleges.
Many HS kids aren’t aware of more than a handful of career fields so medicine is attractive. And even within medicine many can only name a few such as doctor or nurse but these are far from the only in the health field that help people. Physical therapists, radiology techs, speech pathologists, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, to name but just a few as shown on http://explorehealthcareers.org Careers that take less than 11+ years of education and training and the immense debt that comes with a M.D.
Unless she’s considered the alternatives and has spent time actually working in a health care setting (an unwritten requirement to get into med school) it’s better to think of her as interested in exploring a career as a doctor rather than someone who has already made the decision.
Thank you for your insight! We visited both ASU and U of A this fall and the campus tour at ASU was much more comprehensive. They did match us up with 2 pre-med students for the tour followed by academic advising and housing tour. We toured Barrett the next day which was equally as impressive. We also did a tour of U of A but did not get a chance to to do the honors tour. My daughter did not have as good of an experience with the U of A bc the student tour guides did not have the same academic interests and it was hard to determine if she would be a good fit there. We plan to return to tour both schools and honor colleges in April.
Lots of great programs on the east coast as well. We are from Maryland. UPitt was her number one choice prior to getting into the honors colleges. The big draw for her is the warmer arizona weather. She is dreading a pittsburgh winter but will bear it if it is the better undergrad program for pre-med. Having the hospital so close to campus is a real advantage.
We had great visits at Pitt, ASU and Vtech. Now trying to dig deeper in each of their programs. Good Luck to your daughter!!
The high temp today in the Phoenix area is about 63 so the warmer weather in the winter is pretty great. Summer isn’t as bad as one might think…it’s much less humid and you kind of just go from one air conditioned space to another.
LOL! Our last name is certainly not Buffet or Bezos. OOS tuition is also another factor. Don’t want to dry up all the college funds and be left with a hefty price tag for medical school. I hear that graduate programs are well funded but when it comes to med school and health professional programs it is mostly out of pocket.
That is good to know about being able to take honors classes without being in honors college at UPitt. Thanks!
Thank you so much for the detailed comparison. This will help as I discuss options with my daughter. Thank you again for taking the time to outline the differences you observed.
Absolutely agree with this. I have had extensive conversations with her about the commitment to pre-med and have discussed alternative health careers. It is important to me that she picks a school that will have options available if she gets to college and realizes medicine isn’t for her.
It is also important to note that many Frederick Honors College programs are open to the entire University population. For example, all students can apply for honors research fellowships and enroll in honors courses, even if they are not official members of the Frederick Honors College.
Same boat. We are in Ohio and accepted to Pitt, IU Bloomington, U of A honors and Barrett. Neuroscience or Bio but really not interested in presumed, hoping to work in industry instead .Still waiting on Maryland but it’s probably not an option because of the OOS tuition/known lack of merit. Daughter was in love with the weather in Arizona, liked Barrett a bit more but we think U of A sciences may be better. I think she is now getting some cold feet about the logistics of being so far away. She’s completely in love with a Pitt but so far zero merit and that’s just not going to fly out of state. I would say right now the COA at the two Arizona schools are about the same with the current merit but hoping to get some more. Very conflicted! If she was pre med I think we would definitely try to make Pitt work but the concern is that she may actually be at a disadvantage there for getting research and lab time because there are so many premed kids there that would be in her major.
We had the exact same experience on the U of A your. all they talked about was sports and there was almost no mention of academics and it really put her off. The honors college talk there was fine but she had already closed her mind based off of the main campus tour. We had an excellent tour at ASU and Barrett but I feel like my daughter might be making snap judgments just based off that U of A tour and I want her to keep her mind open to both honors colleges now that she’s been accepted to both. Especially since U of A science is so strong.
This is too funny!! Your situation mirrors ours almost Exactly except for the pre-med track. We also feel Pitt is the best option but it was -1 degrees the other day and my daughter has been apprehensive about the weather since the beginning. We knew nothing about Pitt when we visited. We literally looked up top schools for neuroscience and Pitt was listed. We actually planned a trip to Penn State first and realized they didn’t have an undergrad neuroscience degree and decided to Visit Pitt as well and were were so happy we did. My daughter had an amazing visit to Pitt, she got to speak with many of the students during Blue and Gold day this past summer. Sone were pre-med and some were neuroscience majors and it was great hearing about what they thought about their classes and that study abroad was still an option for students in the science field. It was a great overall experience. Her mind would have been set if it wasn’t for the Pittsburgh weather and the fact we also have not heard about merit.
We had the same impression about the Arizona schools! Did you visit Indiana? What was your daughters impression?
@Path2Success2023 Yes we visited Indiana last year and I thought the campus was absolutely beautiful but we were there on a quiet Saturday and the weather was really bad and for whatever reason my daughter was not into it saying that it “felt too much like Ohio.” Apparently the Greek life is very big there while it it’s just a small percentage at Pitt so not as much pressure to be greek. I thought Bloomington was a really great little college town. They also have a cool bio technology degree that’s a partnership with the Kelley school of business classes so I’m really trying to get her to give IU a second look but its $$$ OOS so right now we are just waiting to hear about merit. Both pitt and IU are only about 3 to 4 hour drive for us so that’s a perfect distance. However with the honors acceptances and the merit the 2 Arizona schools are definitely still towards the top of the list
Since my student got into both of these programs I’m trying to do some cost comparison. If I’m understanding correctly the semester honor fee at Barrett is about double of Franke but the rooms are more costly at Franke. However meal plan at Franke annual says only $3880 and Barrett annual comes out much higher at $6400. These are for the mid-lower level plans. Anyone else come up with this number and find it surprising?