<p>how good is it academically??
and is it really hard to get in??</p>
<p>Awesome academically.</p>
<p>Admissions is also very competitive.</p>
<p>If your credentials are good enough to get into Schreyer Honors College, they are good enough to get into a much better college than Penn State. Schreyer Honors College is still Penn State. Your diploma will still say Penn State. You will be a graduate of Penn State. Honors colleges are marketing gimmicks for helping lower tier colleges attract upper tier students. The ammenities and advantages they offer are not significant.</p>
<p>Penn State is a pretty good school in most things; it's an excellent school in the sciences and engineering. I graduated from Penn State and the SHC in 2004, and my friends got into all the top graduate schools (Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, UC-Berkeley, even Oxford and Cambridge) and med schools (Harvard and Penn), won prestigious fellowships (Marshall, Truman, Churchill, NSF), and started working at all the best consulting and I-banking firms. I'm getting paid to go to graduate school at Stanford. I'm proud that my diploma says Penn State on it, and I greatly enjoyed the four years I spent there.</p>
<p>Honors colleges may or may not be fair to regular students, but the opportunities they extend to honors students are much more then a gimmick. The research, housing, travel, and scheduling advantages make a big difference -- you basically have all the resources of a large university like PSU at your fingertips.</p>
<p>thank you kcs149</p>
<p>any other comments?</p>
<p>I back up kcs149, I'm a current student at SHC. Some honors colleges are gimmicks, but I can't see how SHC is. All my friends up here turned down places like Cornell, Haverford, Amherst, Williams, Penn, etc. to come here. Essentially the SHC squeezes the best out of Penn State for its students, and it works very well. Don't listen to people who are snide enough to say "your diploma will still say 'Penn State' on it"; everything kcs149 has said is true. All 8 Ivies represented in 2003, I believe, including 3 different Harvard grad schools (vet, medical, and something else)... not bad for a diploma that "only" says Penn State. It's entirely what you make of it.</p>
<p>Oh, stuff it, collegehelp (more like college snotball nohelp)! It’s college, not a BMW! Get over yourself.</p>
<p>Only 300 people get accepted so its pretty hard to get in. Academically, you get early registration, more research opportunities, honors housing, exclusive honors classes and guaranteed housing for 4 years.</p>
<p>You do realize this is an 8 year old thread, right?</p>