Honors Program vs Top Colleges?

HI everyone. I’ve always considered the U as a safety school, but I’ve heard that the honors program is extremely good. How does it compare with other top colleges like Rice and WashU? Also, does anyone know how strong the statistics pathway is?

BTW, some basic stats for a quick judge if I can get into honors at CSE, I saw that it’s really competitive based off the given info
ACT 36
SAT 1560
2 SAT Subject 800s
4.00 UW GPA/4.7 Weighted
Rank 7/300 something

I can only comment on my son’s experience, who is currently a sophomore at CSE and also in honors. As a parent, I had similar questions couple years ago.

As you said, it’s very hard to get into CSE to begin with, and extremely difficult to also get into honors program. And it’s getting harder and more competitive every year. Having said that, he does not see much value in honors program if one is engineering major. The only real benefit for engineering major is in the first year, where you can choose honors classes in math, physics, and chemistry, which are generally thought by better professors and class sizes are smaller. Plus, you could live in Middlebrook, honors housing, which he chose not to and lived in engineering LLC which he really enjoyed. And you get to graduate with honors if you meet all requirements of the program.

At UMN, you don’t get to register early like you do at many other honors programs, although that did not affect him negatively.

He also said that he can see the value of honors program for other majors, especially at CLA, where there is much larger selection of honors classes throughout all 4 years to choose from. But overall, for engineers, once you are done with your freshman year weed out classes, there are no honors engineering classes, they are “regular” which means very difficult.

Finally, based on his personal experience, he said that the overall peer group level at CSE (not in honors) is higher than that off all other colleges in honors program, with the exception of CBS and Carlson students. So I wouldn’t stress over getting into honors program if you get accepted to CSE.