Is there any reason to try for summa cum laude?

[DigitalDad]

For the traditional colleges of Columbia University at least, SCL means top 5% of class, MCL means top 15% of class - so it helps someone to easily put whatever 3.x GPA number in perspective. Junior Phi Beta Kappa (awarded in Fall) is even more selective.

The problem - no one will ever know if it were those greek and/or latin honors that did open a door somewhere, where majority of students typically have to wait a year or two before eventually being accepted - or if the same outcome would have happened anyway just based on GPA and strength of the application and interviews alone.

Just posted the honors breakdown in a different post - don’t want to break rules by duplicating:

Grade Inflation at Colleges, especially in the world of Covid

At Columbia College, latin honors will be awarded “to the top 25 percent of the graduating class. Honors are determined by an undergraduate student’s cumulative GPA for all work at Columbia, with the top 5 percent of the graduating class being awarded summa cum laude, the next 10 percent being awarded magna cum laude, and the remaining 10 percent awarded cum laude.” At Barnard, the GPA cutoff will also be reset every year (disrupted by Covid due to mandated P/F grades for some semesters) so that “the top 5 percent of the graduating class being awarded summa cum laude, the next 10 percent being awarded magna cum laude, and the remaining 20 percent awarded cum laude.” For 2020-21, this worked out to 3.97 for summa cum laude, 3.88 for magna cum laude, and 3.76 for cum laude. In either case, SCL/MCL implies approx. top 15% of class. For both colleges, 10% of graduates may be elected to Phi Beta Kappa by faculty, the first 2% already being elected by the end of the last fall semester! …