<p>Seems that forum posters around here make a big deal about honors programs at big universities. There seems to be an exaggerated sense of quality in terms of how such honors programs are viewed, coupled with an exaggerated sense of disdain for the universities overall. An example is the high regard for the Barrett honors program at ASU, but the low regard for ASU overall, that seems to be prevalent around here.</p>
<p>What would be the reason for such viewpoints? Is it merely because people need to have a validation of one's (or one's kid's) sense of worth in being admitted to a more selective entity (if not a more selective school, a more selective honors program at a less selective school), even though a student in the honors program will likely take a majority of his/her courses outside of the honors program?</p>
<p>Honestly…I’m not sure what the disdain is all about. Our kid got accepted to a large OOS public university with a huge scholarship that included in state tuition for her. She applied to the honors college because truly, it made that big school feel smaller. She did not get accepted to the Honors College at that school. I honestly think if she HAD gotten accepted to that Honirs College,she would have chosen that university.</p>
<p>I think the parents of CC should put together their collective wisdom and come up with a decision tree for choosing an honors college of a less selective university over a more selective university </p>
<p>Yes,it might be nice to have a thread that would list questions to ask when choosing between an honors college and a more selective university, covering both what an individual student hopes to get out of college and what various schools can provide, as well as to help parents see what they can comfortably afford. This might be helpful for families making up a list of schools to consider as well as families evaluating offers in hand. Of course, different factors might be more or less salient for each individual.</p>
<p>My own first questions would be - </p>
<p>Is there a huge cost differential, and would the private option leave little or no wriggle room for an emergency, summer classes, or post-bac study?</p>
<p>If a private option is not affordable, the student might need to decide among honors college and should be asking-</p>
<p>Is there a fair sized cohort of motivated students (including lopsided students who might not have made the honors college cut or qualified for a more selective school)in majors or programs that interest the student? </p>
<p>What are the requirements to keep any merit money, and is the university cheaper than the private option if merit money is no longer in the picture?</p>
<p>What are the GPA requirements to maintain honors college perks?</p>
<p>Is thee separate honors housing?</p>
<p>(More subjective) is there resentment of honors college students among the general student body? (Some schools allow students who are late bloomers to work their way into an honors college.)</p>
<p>I think there are outstanding Honors Programs and Colleges at some Universities. For our family, Plan II (UT Austin) has been an outstanding education for daughter, and the University as a whole has been excellent too. Not all parents support the program and yet bash the University.</p>
<p>We faced this choice: DS had a full ride offer from a state university and a seat in the honors college. He also had a full pay offer from a top LAC. </p>
<p>The pure numbers game says take the full ride. And I see that conventional wisdom a lot on CC, in media coverage of college costs, etc. But when we looked hard at the two programs, the two were not educationally comparable. The LAC offered small classes, taught by professors rather than TAs, research opportunities as a freshman and a high caliber of classmates. The honors program at the state university offered some benefits: pre registration for classes, a special freshman seminar, the opportunity to house with other honors college students – but no matter how you house them, the honors students are the very small minority of a very large campus. They do not drive campus culture or the school’s educational priorities. </p>
<p>When we added up the pros and cons, the LAC won and we opted to pay for what we all wanted from DS’ education. In our case, the “good enough” state option did not sway us. </p>
<p>Each family must do its own calculus on this. There’s no one right answer. </p>
<p>To me it seems like having separate honors housing would make a big difference. I’m curious what people with experience about that think. How easy is it to connect to other honors kids at a huge University where they aren’t housed together?</p>
<p>^ My daughter is that situation. She could not get into the honors dorm. She did find it harder to connect with other honors student initially. However, she is connecting as time goes on since there are a lot of honor students in the courses she has decided to take. It has help that she prefers honors courses and the more intensive non-honors courses.</p>
<p>My son graduated from Penn State Shreyers honors college. They have sent kids to Harvard law and med schools and MIT phd programs to name a few. Their students have gotten jobs with Goldman Sachs and Google for those of you that hold these as standards.</p>
<p>Speaking for myself, it’s not so much that I’m looking at the Schreyer Honors College as a better education than regular PSU, it’s more that it makes a huge school more manageable. If our daughter decides to stay in Philadelphia, PSU is already very well regarded. But if she graduates from the honors college, it’s definitely a bonus in the job market. Not so much because it will be regarded as a better education, but because its graduates are presumed to be smarter than the average bear. :)</p>
<p>There’s something to be said for being a big fish in a small pond. It’s all well and good that a private college with an enrollment of 1,500 claims to offer personalized attention to each student, but perhaps it means something more when individual faculty mentoring is offered to each of the 150 students in Big U’s elite honors program. If Big U is offering special privileges to its honors students in order to entice them away from the Ivies, that may be a deal worth taking.</p>
<p>And, yes, not all classes will be honors classes, but the student who was offered a spot in the honors program probably has enough AP credit that he/she isn’t signed up for many of the 200-person “intro” classes anyway.</p>
<p>@Dodgersmom: you eloquently expressed my sentiments. I would add the fact that all of these benefits are provided at a fraction of the cost of an LAC or Ivy.</p>
<p>I have only visited one honors school, the one at Oklahoma University. I found the OU Honors College to be a different school from the rest of OU. This despite the fact that they are on the same campus and use the same facilities. But it was quite obvious that it was a match for D1. Seriously, that’s what we want for our kids. The rest of the school wouldn’t provide the special pampering that the honors students received or the group of quirky kids she would best fit in. I don’t have any disdain for the rest of the school but it is nice to have an option to receive special attention. Hope to visit Barrett soon.</p>
<p>Yep, So I attend OOS Honors college, with special floors for honors students. When I arrive, they added names to our rooms (I formally had a single), from a group from another scholarship program. A semester of hell. I hated my time there so much, got out as fast as I could. I never thought of transferring. My few friends were pre-med or pre-grad school or Peace corps. So, for son, I set the bar high, and promised him I would find a way to fund him if he got into a selective U. I wanted him to be with his peers, not among the top 5%. I wished he would be challenged and supported. Bottom line, I never wanted him to look back on his college experience with the dislike that I did. I saved my parents a few thousand, especially as I graduated within 3 years, but it was an awful 3 years.</p>
<p><em>For the full-pay student perhaps.</em> Not for the student with a lot of need.</p>
<p>I tried to get my kid to apply to Pitt as a safety. It had the advantages of rolling admissions, significant FA for high stats OOS kids, and a respected honors college. He refused, saying that he did not like the idea of attending an honors college within a larger U. Not being bedeviled with the story of andison, he didn’t think it was necessary. Ultimately, he was correct.</p>
<p>It’s all about fit. My D is a scholar athlete and chose a oos state school and was accepted into the honors program. As a freshman, she had the opportunity to do research and present to the faculty. She was offered a research fellow position for next year with the opportunity to present at a state wide conference in the spring. She is ecstatic. All this while also playing her sport. </p>
<p>It may not have been possible to “multi task” at any other school but the smallness of the honors program has allowed her to become acquainted with the faculty and other students in a short amount of time. My S who is at another school is just now doing special projects in his major as a senior. </p>
<p>These responses have all been so helpful to me-- I’m choosing between ASU Barrett, USC Trustee, and UT Austin Business Honors. Do you have any advice?</p>
<p>Edit: Forgot to add that ASU and USC with full-tuition scholarships, and UT with in-state!</p>
<p>I went to a big university that, at the time, was not that selective (over 50% of frosh then had to take remedial English composition), but was a safety for me (although I did not know that until later). There was no formal honors program, but there were honors courses in some subjects (these were not that popular, as most students thought that the regular courses were hard enough). I did not find the experience as unpleasant as many here seem to assume in terms of how interacting with students of someone lower academic ability and motivation must be unpleasant. There were plenty of top end students to interact with if that was the goal, but even the other students were a lot higher in academic ability and motivation than most of the students in high school.</p>
<p>So it is a puzzle to me as to why people tend to have such disdain for big universities like ASU that have low baseline selectivity but do have some top end students. That seems to tie in to the apparently exaggerated importance placed on honors programs like Barrett that seem to be the consensus assumption.</p>
<p>In high school you also have a broad mix of students and some top end students. Except that in a high school, you will find those students more easily because the school is way smaller than 40K students, and also I think being in the same class together is more of a social experience in high school than in college. For classes where it’s advantageous to have a study group, I think it could be harder to join good groups if you don’t have any connections at an honors dorm. </p>
<p>ASU’s SAT scores are lower than our high school average. For kids who have felt in high school that classes weren’t challenging enough, that oftentimes group members didn’t contribute enough, that class discussions were hampered by too many students who just lacked interest, background knowledge, or even having bothered to do the reading, I think it’s reasonable to expect that such a college wouldn’t be a better experience than high school. Yet students who are willing to work will get a good, though not the very best, education at our high school, and I’m sure the same is true at ASU. </p>
<p>Must be a high school with nearly everyone going to a four year college or university. When I went to high school, only about a third of graduates went directly to a four year college or university (though additional graduates went to the community college), which was probably more like the median high school (although the high school’s college-bound rate is much higher now, due to the general region changing with more higher income and higher education level parents moving in). So even a not that selective four year college or university would have better students on average than my high school when I was there.</p>
<p>Perhaps that explains the disdain for schools like ASU among many here – the student profile at schools like ASU may not be better than the very good or elite high schools that they or their kids have experience with.</p>
</p>