I would be shocked if PBK has any objections to increasing the number of people that can pay that fee. Yes, it is the honor society, but they also want to make $$$
I have a feeling these kinds of things are way more important to the parents than the students. I asked a recent grad (summa cum laude) if they were invited to these and they said, ya, sure, TBP, but it doesnāt mean a thing. Tech is about what you do, not about paying someone to validate what you did. Seems like old school concept to them and not relevant today. btw, their starting salary was out of this world, with many zeros.
Just repeating what I heard. But frankly, I agree, if I were OP I wouldnāt give it a second thought.
Iām a STEM person who has worked in both industry and academia. No one seemed to care about my PBK status when I was in industry, but itās a pretty big deal here at my university ā I dropped it off my CV once and my immediate supervisor told me I should put it back onā¦and I was elected to PBK over 30 years ago.
So, as always, YMMV.
Thanks to this thread, I looked up the requirements for the Phi Beta Kappa chapter at my alma mater (top 1.5% of the junior class, to be elected as a junior.) Once again I have been reminded that I hit my intellectual peak when I was 21 years old.
I looked up requirements at Sās school and they include a college level science class and four semesters of college level foreign language. Top 1% invited as juniors and top 7% invited as seniors. l wonder if AP credits for those things count. I canāt imagine S taking unneeded science or foreign language just to be eligible for an honor society.
I was PBK years ago but didnāt know it was a big deal, if it was. I figured Deanās List and gpa told that part of my story.
I looked up PBK requirements for DSā college. He is likely to meet the grade requirements, but not the distribution requirements. They require arts, humanities, social science, and pure math. No mention of natural sciences! I donāt understand this.
@iwannabe_Brown (#50), thatās close to my DSā situation. By the time he finishes, heāll have several pure math courses, a couple of humanities courses, a couple of arts classes, but no social sciences. Absolutely no gut courses. No way this will add up to 2/5 of his courses.
Not sure how much latitude individual schools are given? The requirements from the PBK website include:
The studentās record shall include coursework in the liberal arts and sciences equivalent to at least three-quarters of the credits ordinarily required for a bachelorās degree in these fields (e.g., not less than 90 semester hours of work if 120 hours are normally required for such a degree). The liberal arts and sciences encompass the traditional disciplines of the natural sciences, mathematics, social sciences, and humanities. Select courses in other programs of study may be included only if they unambiguously embody the liberal arts and sciences.
and
Weight shall be given to the breadth and depth of study in liberal arts and sciences, taking into account the number, variety, and level of courses taken outside the requirements of the major, and the proportion of the candidateās overall program those courses constitute. Consideration shall also be given to the number of elective courses taken above the introductory, or general education, level.
It reads as if schools should only be able to add to the core?
Our S just followed the regular engineering curriculum and had no foreign language. D has a lot of breadth but her grades were very uneven. She had only the required 3 semesters of foreign language. Neither of them were invited to be BPK. I was invited to my surprise and accepted. I believe I was a SR when I was invited, but no clear memory. I donāt recall any fee that was significant but since I had heard of it I figured it was worth joining. I didnāt buy a key nor attend any ceremony (not sure if they even had one). I never bothered to read the requirements. At least one of my nephews was invited and accepted PBK. I am not sure if any of my other relatives are PBK, as it doesnāt come up.
I was a W/S student and working in the vice-provostās office when I was in college. I suggested to him that I re-activate the freshman honor societies, Phi Eta Sigma and Alpha Lambda Delta for my job. He was surprised and agreed that was a fine thing to do for my W/S job, so that was what I did. I had enjoyed being a member in HI before I transferred to UofOR. Both societies were the most positive things I did at UofHI.
Looks like chapters can make the requirements more specific (e.g. specified amounts of each category (humanities, social science, natural science, math)) than just 3/4 of the course work having to be in liberal arts that is the baseline specified in the quoted text.
My daughterās alma mater didnāt have any more specific course requirements, but the college distribution requirements at the time would probably have been enough ā itās somewhat more relaxed now, but when my daughter was in college all students needed a full year of a lab science, 2 years of foreign language, etc. Selection for PBK required nomination by a faculty member who was also PBK.
And I think it was a BFD for my daughter. Itās definitely an honor, though perhaps more well known to those, like my daughter, who pursued degrees in social sciences or humanities.
OP here with an update. My son was allowed to accept the offer even though the deadline had passed. Turns out the deadline was just because the school needed to know for the awards assembly. The actual PBK invite was still available for accepting. So future parents in this position, know that it is worth having your student ask if they can still join. He has accepted the invite and I said Iād pay for it. Thanks for all the interesting discussion. Just FYI, my son is a CS major at an LAC, so at least at his school CS majors qualify.
'Grats, ttm.
It was for my D, as well. At the time, it was just a nice honor for four years of work.
But several years later, and since she has decided to pursue academia, the āmembershipā in PBK has become even more valuable, as sits nicely on the CV. No GPA necessary, and it easily trumps Latin honors since the cutoffs for those are school specific and outsiders have no way of knowing if the masses earn Latin Honors. (hereās looking at a certain school in Cambridge from the dark ages).
Glad to hear that the OPās son could still accept the invitation!
My kid has PBK on her resume and her LinkedIn profile.
Itās interestingāto me at leastāthat nobody mentioned one benefit of PBK for certain students. PBK ācertifiesā colleges. Not every college that would like to have a PBK chapter can have one. The college undergoes an investigation of its quality by PBK which is not unlike accreditation. https://www.pbk.org/web/PBK_Member/Chapter_Management/Starting_A_Chapter.aspx Very few colleges, notably Bryn Mawr, refuse to have chapters.
I know this because my dad told me many years ago that he didnāt want me to go to a college that didnāt have a PBK chapter. He felt --and back then it may well have been trueāthat the most likely reason a college didnāt have a chapter was that it didnāt qualify for one. So, for him it was an easy way to certify that some small LAC he had never heard of because it was in a different region of the country was in fact a āgoodā school ā¦or wasnāt.
Academics know this. Iām not sure thatās as true as it was back then, but stillā¦if you went to Harvard, everyoneās heard of it. If you went to a small LACā¦maybe not. If you were elected to PBK, it means not only that you did well in comparison to other students, it means also that your college was of a certain quality. One criterion that used to really trip up small colleges was a good library. I donāt know if thatās as important now. Still back when I was in high school and dinosaurs roamed the earth, if a faraway school had a PBK chapter, you knew it had a good library, which was important.
Thatās a good point about small LACs that may not have a great national academic brand. PBK can be a substitute brand.
Yes, my skeptical spouse used whether, and how long, a particular school had a PBK chapter, as a factor in assessing midwest LACs, most of which he was not familiar with, for our younger kidās search.
The advice to look for a school with a Phi Beta Kappa is still being bandied about today.
And the size, breadth, depth of the collegeās library collections/subscriptions to journal articles is critical for students who are serious about their studies. It is still critical for those who want to do a credible job in intermediate/advanced seminar style classes or moresoā¦students doing an honorsā thesis.
Granted, if a student is inclined to maximize time on partying/beer/social life/goofing off while spending the minimal amount of time possible on academics like some classmates or a few older relatives did, great college libraries arenāt likely to even be a consideration.
I turned down PBK back in the day. I didnāt want to pay the fee, and I thought my undergraduate record spoke for itself. Iāve never regretted it. I donāt think it hurt me the least bit in applying to highly selective graduate programs, nor did it hurt me in applying for my first couple of jobs out of grad school where my grad school record counted far more than any undergrad honors. After the first couple of jobs it was all about what I had done professionally up until that point, with my undergraduate record essentially irrelevant. My turning down PBK did disappoint my parents, however. I guess they wanted the bragging rights and in their circles PBK meant something.
@Midwestmomofboys: āYes, my skeptical spouse used whether, and how long, a particular school had a PBK chapter, as a factor in assessing midwest LACs, most of which he was not familiar with, for our younger kidās search.ā
Hmm. That heuristic seems problematic to me. Marietta got a PBK chapter a full century before Macalester, for instance.