My D is in a flagship Honors College. Her experience has been mixed: Honors business classes seemed no tougher than the non-Honors versions, just smaller. She thought her English / lit courses had a heavy workload (partially because of what @MYOS1634 mentioned – in a class of 15 or fewer, you need to be fully prepared to participate every single day) but I doubt that she ever saw a syllabus for the non-Honors version, so who knows if it was actually more rigorous. She will NOT take the Honors version of Vector Calc because other students have warned that it is harder than non-Honors version (which is already pretty difficult), probably because it is usually taken by Math and Engineering majors (she isn’t) from the Honors College, so really strong students moving at a fast pace. Her hope is that the overall Honors designation will matter to employers, although the individual class choices may not (meaning an employer likely would not care that she took Honors Accounting, but might consider completion of the formal Honors curriculum a plus).