<p>Thank You CWalker. I was told that there is some other honors Biotech program. My S is not so keen on medicine. But he is very keen on Biotech/Bioengineering and is a likely candidate for most of the honors program mentioned in this thread.</p>
<p>I looked at UCLA Honors program but doesn't seem that students get much of a priority in housing or smaller classes etc.</p>
<p>Clemson has already been mentioned, however student can apply for the National Scholar Program which is full ride plus perks.</p>
<p>Travel Family:
As far as I know, every college and most departments at UCSD have honors programs. For the colleges this typically involves priority class registration and other minor perks. All you have to do to get in is achieve a certain GPA and attend honors seminars. Most departments allow students to write a thesis or complete another significant project that allows the student to graduate with honors. I'm pretty sure that the only way to get 4 years of guaranteed housing is to be a Regents Scholar -----> Current</a> Students: Regents Scholarships</p>
<p>Miami U (OH) has a great Honors program. it accepts about 200 freshmen. Lots of scholarships and other benefits, like free summer including abroad.</p>
<p>does Michigan State or U of Michigan have a better honors program?</p>
<p>MSU seems to have really good OOS merit money, not so much U of M......</p>
<p>You can get in-state tuition as a merit scholarship at MSU. I did not hear of U of M merit money, they seem not to have many merit awards. In this sense, it is much cheaper to go to something like Case Western that gives out huge awards and still very highly ranked.
We were much more impressed overall with Miami (OH) than MSU. Did not apply to U of M (only 50 min. to drive) because of out-of-state tuition. However, Case Western lowered tuition all the way down to only about $5000 with huge academic award.</p>
<p>Unc Has An Honors Program...but Unc Isn't As Good As Duke...so....</p>
<p>MiamiDAP -- Regarding U Michigan vs. Case Western, I don't know how Case Western is ranked... I though I had a good idea of Top 50, and don't recall ever seeing that University before. How is it ranked, and what is the level of prestige? Your post seems to imply they are close to each other.</p>
<p>** edit ** I found it, and it is Top 50... don't know why I didn't recognize that. I see it is #41 on the USNWR ranking.</p>
<p>A very good, public, honors college, that also happens to be a CTCL school:</p>
<p>New College of Southern Florida</p>
<p>
[quote]
UC Berkeley does not have an honors program... they insist everyone is honors! haha
[/quote]
Darn right! It would be considered redundant. ;)</p>
<p>^^ Case Western is very prestigious. However, most famous for pre-med and engineering. Med School is very good. Combined med. program (bs/md) is impossible to get into. U of M might be ranked highler, but if we are talking prestige combined with ability to get merit $$, U of M is nowhere near CRWU.</p>
<p>When I visited Johns Hopkins someone asked the admissions counselor if they had an honors program, and he looked kind of shocked. He told her the whole school is like an honors program. I was just reminded about that because of the Berkeley discussion above me.</p>
<p>Anyway, I live in Pennsylvania and Penn State's Honors College is very well known and respected around here. Apparently it's one of the best honors programs in the nation (according to Fiske)</p>
<p>UCBChemEGrad -- </p>
<p>In my view, UMich, UVA and UCLA Honors puts them in Top 15, ahead of generic Berkeley, though I agree non-honors Berkeley wins. To be in the top 15%, or 25%, (or wherever the cutoff) of an already Top 25 program certainly pushes all three significantly up the ranking hierarchy. O believe at par or ahead of Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Gtown, Northwestern, Hopkins, UVA-regular, Emory, etc. Which is the argument about large flagships anyway -- that the top 1000 or so freshman matriculants (out of 3000 - 5,500 total) at these flagships are the equivalent quality student to those at the Top 10-15. With honors course selection, these top 500 (or 1000) in Honors now have a tailor made program that is appropriate to their capabilities.</p>
<p>Miami DAP -- I know what a Junior University is (I went to Stanford), but what is a Reserve University? I am a wine collector, and Reserve usually means the best barrels out of the bunch. Are there several Case Western Universities, and this one is the best of them ?? :)</p>
<p>^ IMO, honors programs makes the university worse...</p>
<p>Let's make a two class system...:rolleyes:
1. It eliminates top students from contributing to the "standard" courses.
2. It causes redundancy and inefficiencies on resources to teach essentially the same classes.
3. It's too much like high school...top private colleges don't practice this, why should top publics?</p>
<p>UCBChemEGrad --</p>
<p>There is the positive side to consider as well:</p>
<ol>
<li>the top students challenge and push each other without the delay of explaining the BASIC idea again to the slower students</li>
<li>the classes are not essentially the same.. they are far more integrative, in the manner of the best LACs</li>
<li>Top private LACs are exactly like this... simply with their ENTIRE class of 500 or 800 or whatever.</li>
</ol>
<p>It is clear (see link and quote below) that the purpose of UCLA's Honors College is to teach students HOW to think, rather than what others have thought. Exactly the purpose of an elite LAC.</p>
<p>Read the introductory pages on the UCLA Honors website. Tell me that doesn't sound like Reed, or Swarthmore, or Wellesley, and tell me that it sounds like the rest of the UCLA (or Berkeley or UMich or Northwestern or Harvard) website, with its compartmentalized, specialized, unintegrated focus. About</a> UCLA Honors Programs Especially these sentences:</p>
<p>"Honors at UCLA focuses upon an interpretation of the intellectual life that is vital, innovative, interdisciplinary, student-oriented, rich in research and centered upon active, participatory learning. </p>
<p>The seminar is favored over the lecture; the primary source over the textbook; the hands-on research over the abstract theory; the congruence of knowledge over the discrete discipline. </p>
<p>By emphasizing what coheres, rather than what separates, traditional classifications of knowledge, the College Honors curriculum is able to appeal to and meet the needs of students drawn from almost every major, department and division in the university. "</p>
<p>If you want a LAC environment, go to a LAC.</p>
<p>
[quote]
1. the top students challenge and push each other without the delay of explaining the BASIC idea again to the slower students
[/quote]
Yeaaah, an SAT score really delineiates someone's intellectual fire power.<br>
Small class size is most useful in humanities and social science classes (which are small at all colleges to begin with)...in these classes you want a variety of social backgrounds for contributions of opinion.</p>
<p>
[quote]
the classes are not essentially the same.. they are far more integrative, in the manner of the best LACs
[/quote]
Really, now? Show me some proof via syllabus comparison.</p>
<p>I've read several threads that the UCLA honors program is a joke...it's just a ploy to get early/priority registration.</p>
[quote]
Honors doesn't really have any additional prestige, or the weight that the name "honors" has in high school (departmental honors is a different story, however). Really, the only DIRECT correlation is that you get priority enrollment for classes, for at least three quarters. Priority enrollment means that you get to enroll for your first set of classes before anyone else, which is extremely helpful, especially as a freshman. I haven't done any honors classes, and don't plan to, which means I'll be dropped after spring quarter. But, I got three FREE quarters of priority enrollment.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I can understand that as a ChemE grad, you would not have an appreciation for classes designed to help you learn to think when the data are grey, rather than one or zero.</p>
<p>Take the larger intro courses in Econ, Psych, English, Econ, Sociology, Philosophy, Geography, PoliSci, Geology, History, Linguistics, etc., etc.</p>
<p>In these courses a person learns what others have thought and said over time. The person is asked to summarize some aspect of this on papers and exams. That is foundational and interesting. Yet, it does very little to shape a person's own thoughts, or help a person integrate concepts from sociology and biology, or linguistics and computer science. More fundamentally, the way courses are presented in very large universities affords the student very little opportunity for DIALOGUE! More importantly, a person can misinterpret what another has written, form a completely opposite impression to the one the author intended, and go through life with wrong-headed ideas attributed to experts! I have been around education a very long time, and have three degrees. I am convinced that the large lecture format is the absence of true small group dialogue (and by this I don't mean a 30 person TA-led discussion group appendage to a large lecture class) is a very poor method of instruction. It is education on the cheap and easy, and mostly ineffective. The seminar or smaller setting allows for a student to form an idea, present it, receive feedback, modify the idea, present it again, in a continual loop of feeedback/modify/feedback/modify.</p>
<p>The feedback is so poor in most arts, humanities, social and behavioral science classes that a person can graduate without ever having taken a position and having it challenged! Often the only challenge arrives in the sparse comments from a final exam, paper or project!</p>
<p>What kind of education is that?</p>
<p>^ LOL!</p>
<p>If they are such "special and exclusive classes" that only the top 3% of UCLA students are invited to attend, why do they need "priority" enrollment to sign up?</p>
<p>
[quote]
The feedback is so poor in most arts, humanities, social and behavioral science classes that a person can graduate without ever having taken a position and having it challenged! Often the only challenge arrives in the sparse comments from a final exam, paper or project!
[/quote]
I took quite a few social science/humanities classes at Berkeley and I never encountered the poor feedback loop problem you describe...despite my lack of appreciation for "grey data"...Some examples of courses I took were: Introductory Econ (large class with 700 students and discussion section of 30 students), Demographic Trends and Measures (small class with 20 students - including ~10 grad students), and The American President (about 25 students)...</p>
<p>UCBChemEgrad: Your quote above is from a student who took no Honors classes at all. Why do you even bother to quote such a person? As regards prestige, my comments about Honors are unrelated to prestige, and entirely related to what is an effective structure in which to learn.</p>