I am a Mass. resident headed down south to look at a bunch of larger state schools and their honors programs: U. Miss; Miss State; U Alabama (Tuscaloosa); Auburn; Georgia State; and U Georgia.
I’m top 10, STEM-heavy, bunch of APs, SAT 1530. I’m looking for good research, close knit honors community; on-campus living; good grad/med school admission rate; and (very important) OUT OF STATE MERIT scholarships.
Any advice or comments are appreciated.
Honors colleges offer valuable perks and let you meet some of the top students at your college. But too often they’re oversold with glossy pamphlets suggesting a small LAC has been set up giving an elite private education at the public school price. On the forum you’ll see posts that say/imply that.
Depending on the program offerings may range from separate honors classes to taking just one honors seminar per semester. And some of the “honors” offerings may just be a discussion section of the regular class (at many U’s you meet 2-3x a week in the full class with the prof, then once a week in a smaller discussion section with a TA). You really need to dig in to find what a particular school offers.
Honors programs typically offer the small classes and hand-picked profs the 1st two years of college. It doesn’t take that many classes to come up with a set that will meet the lower-division requirements for most majors. But it’s rare to find more than a token amount of upper-division classes since the honors program simply doesn’t have enough faculty members to create entire majors. So the last two years most or all classes are the regular U’s classes. The teaching of the profs will be geared towards the normal level, the discussions and student involvement in class will be dominated by the regular students, and so on. Class sizes may balloon, too, if you’re in a popular major.
Honors colleges offer perks in addition to the classes. Typical ones include early registration so you get the classes you want (a perk worth its weight in gold!), special counselors, guaranteed housing, special library privileges. Your diploma will proudly bear the honors insignia. But I would have reservations about attending a college for its honors program in liu of a more highly regarded U if finances are not an issue.
If you tour Alabama (Tuscaloosa), reach out to the honors college ahead of time and they can help plan a visit. Since you’re interested in research be sure to look at a selective research program in the Honors College called Randall Research Scholars. If that isn’t appealing, UA also has a program called Emerging Scholars that could be of interest for research opportunities. UA’s honors dorms are also fantastic!
We were in your position a year ago, and my son has really been impressed with Alabama. They also have really good merit scholarships for OOS students. If you might be a NMSF be sure to look at their National Merit scholarship–it is worth about $200,000.
Unfortunately, I don’t know much of anything about the other schools you asked about. Hopefully others will pipe in.
Good luck!