However, there is no special housing associated with it (though Regents’ scholars get priority housing lottery numbers) and no special classes associated with it (there are honors classes, but having a Regents’ scholarship has no bearing on enrolling in them).
Perhaps not a surprise, since UVA lists “relation with alumnus” as “very important” in admissions:
https://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg02_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=1571
@ucbalumnus No special classes at UVA either, just exemptions giving more flexibility. So is special housing better than a $2000 pa merit scholarship? Seems about even to me (i.e. I can see why some might prefer one or the other but I doubt it would be an 80/20 split either way).
Both of these programs explicitly state they are intended to encourage top students to enroll (i.e. rather than going to Ivies/LACs)
Isn’t the typical SES distribution at a super-selective private school like this:
- About 1/2 with no financial aid (top 2-3%).
- About 1/10 to 1/5 with Pell grant (bottom 50%).
- The "people in between", or about 3/10 to 2/5, from the upper half excluding the very top.
Yes, the “people in between” are underrepresented, but not relative to the Pell grant people. It is the top 2-3% that are vastly overrepresented and squeezing out everyone else.
@JMS111 I sent you a PM. 
If this student is interested in majoring in math, the fact that he is highly advanced in math will put him in upper level math courses as a college frosh. At big universities, these tend to be much smaller than the lower level ones shared with many other majors but which he will have completed in high school. But some small LACs may have only a limited selection of upper level math courses.
“at the tippy-top, diversity is a reasonable fraction of Pell Grant recipients, and mostly top 1%, with little concern for the underrepresentation of people in between. It is why I don’t like Pell Grant percentages as the sole measure.”
Yes, thanks for expressing what I was trying to say much better than I did.
In my opinion, whether or not 2.5% or 5% of your students are from families in the lowest 20% of income doesn’t affect the vibe of a college nearly as much as having well more than half of the students in the highest 10% (with most of those in the top 5%).
“if this kind of diversity is important to a family, then honors program at a state school might be a better fit.”
Just to be clear, I commented on this because I believe this is a significant difference in the two choices and it seems wrong not to be very up front about it (without putting any value judgement on how important that fact might be to any given student). The high end private colleges have extraordinarily high percentages – often more than 50% – of students who are very, very privileged (not just affluent, but in the top percentages of income).
“Centre in many ways offers a stellar education that is better than University of Kentucky’s at the undergrad level…”
@MYOS1634 again, not for everybody. Too many generalizations. A sharp STEM kid with 13 APs and 3 DE classes, heading toward med school and/or grad school with essentially no gen ed work left to do, who really is looking to maximize the number of higher level bio/chem/neuroscience classes for the rest of his UG work, UK is a much better option. If you compare the breadth of junior/senior level coursework you can do at UK with Centre, it just isn’t comparable. He may decide not to use the fourth year at UK or U of L, but if he does he will probably end up triple majoring or taking a combination of graduate level courses during the fourth year, which is an option at both UK and U of L that isn’t available at Centre without a grad school.
It isn’t that we don’t value education for education’s sake, but I also know my kid. And I know the fact that Centre is going to make him take more history, English, calculus, and so on, even after he has made 4s and 5s on the AP exams, he isn’t going to be as excited about that as he will be to get onto more advanced science coursework. I know it isn’t a race, but that’s who he is and what he wants, so we are following that.
I don’t anticipate DS being in very many large lecture hall types of courses. Even the first and second year bio and chem courses have honors sections. Smaller classes taken with kids in the honors program with higher academic credentials than the equivalent cohort class at Centre.
@circuitrider:
“Would someone please explain to me why a place like the University of Virginia needs an honors college? Isn’t the term itself kind of redundant? Does Berkeley have an honors college?”
Does Duke need special scholars programs?
Does USC need honors programs?
UVA doesn’t call it an Honors College. It’s a “Scholars Program” as distinct from a Scholarship Program because there’s no money associated with it. A cheap incentive to persuade top kids to go there, in fact UVA says “Many Echols Scholars have told us that the privilege of being selected for the Program contributed substantially to their choice of the University of Virginia over other peer institutions and top-tier liberal arts colleges because of its unique academic structure and flexibility.”
Duke and (especially) USC use merit scholarships for the same purpose. As private schools with much higher tuition fees they have more flexibility to do so.
Anyone know anything about UNC’s honors program?
For some students, a Regents’ scholarship at UCB can have a monetary award larger than $2,500.
California residents who would otherwise get financial aid will get need (based on FAFSA EFC) met with the scholarship without expectation of student loan or work earnings (effectively an approximately $8,000 upgrade for those who would otherwise get financial aid grants).
http://financialaid.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/docs/forms/RC_Terms_Conditions_2017-18.pdf
Non-residents get a scholarship that cancels the additional non-resident tuition; if they have financial need (based on FAFSA EFC), the amount adjusts upward to meet that need if necessary (they would otherwise get no financial aid).
http://financialaid.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/docs/forms/RC_Terms_Conditions_OOS_2017-18.pdf
@homerdog love your cavalier! My D 18 is having a different experience—seeing kids who are partiers and don’t work as hard getting into elite LACs because they play a sport. While the really high achievers are considering public honors programs. So I guess it’s just a crapshoot.
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@ucbalumnus So perhaps it would be 80/20 in favor of Berkeley but probably not the other way round. Though in-state vs out-of-state would potentially be even more of a swing factor.
@JMS111 just PMd you.
I have trouble understanding the business side of the typical state U honors program. I understand there is competition to attract students with top credentials, but it seems very expensive to do so when they offer these kids so much along with large merit awards. I guess everyone is playing the raise and protect our rankings game, but it kind of becomes a race to the bottom over time.
There can seem to be so much of dichotomy of experiences that makes me a little uncomfortable in some ways. For example, a large group of students at Louisville work part time nights at UPS. There is a partnership between UPS and the college that is a pretty good deal, where students can get free tuition if they keep their grades up as well as holding down the job. The reality is though that these kids are going to have a very different experience than my kid if he goes there. My kid will be asleep in the honors dorm during the night, everything funded by scholarships, while the kid working at UPS is lifting packages all night. After class DS may head over to the students center and burn off some steam shooting some hoops, while the UPS kid is just hoping to catch a couple of hours of sleep before he does it all over again. DS and UPS kid may never have a class together, since DS will only end up taking honors sections and/or upper level science classes. Are they even going to the same school?
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A small school with a full set of sports teams can have a very high percentage of the students as athletes. So the percentage of admission spots for recruited athletes is higher, and it is possible that sports as an EC may be favored over other ECs in regular admission readings in the hope that a more athletic frosh class will produce more walk on to fill the teams.
So this phenomenon is not a crapshoot since it is rather predictable.
Does this group tend to be mostly traditional or nontraditional students?
@LOUKYDAD, at a large university, experiences may be pretty different for all sorts of students.
You need money to provide the same high-level experience for everyone, so that is something that typically only rich privates can pull off (and even then, depending on the school, there may be a large workload differential between majors).
Or you could go to the other extreme (CC or commuter regionals without special honors programs or many European unis) where everyone gets the same bare-bones academic experience.
@ucbalumnus wrote:
This is why Wesleyan’s first foray into doctoral programs was Math.