National Collegiate Honors Council at nchchonors dot org which has a clickable map where you can see all the schools in a state that are members. They offer trips and scholarships for honors students.
Thank you! You’re all so very informative and generous with your time. Found a lot of Loyola Honors specific information online. Will check the other resources recommended as well for an informed decision.
As you can see Honors Programs (and Honors Colleges) vary widely. I could extoll the virtues of mine (Wisconsin) but that is irrelevant to you. You need to explore the options at pertinent schools, which you are doing. Your son certainly needs to be doing the research- winter break is a great time for this. As for medical school- no guarantees he will get in to any- there is a surplus of talent out there. Many students will attend their public U’s and going to an elite school may not make the difference.
Your job now is to help your son make informed decisions about college. He needs to figure which school has the best opportunities for his major (he needs a plan B along with being a physician hopeful) and how an Honors program will benefit him. Think academics available- such as classes et al, not housing. He may find one school trumps others when he looks at classes offered in his major and related fields.
Finances do matter. Your state flagship with honors may trump other options for costs. However, the college experience at a different school may be right for him. Many academic and social factors.
Some of it is busy work. My alma mater just instituted an “honors” program that consists of reading newspaper articles and discussing them. My kids have been engaged in that kind of thing at school since they were in third grade. I was really annoyed.
Again, it depends on the school. UW-Madison has an excellent one, started in the 1950’s at the request of students and improved extras now with computer communications not existent in my era. I am appalled at some of other school’s versions. You need to figure out the details for the school.
Another unsung benefit of honors progams: your son’s transcript will be filled with honors notations on his classes. When applying to med school, GPA/MCAT is king. But they will also note the rigor of the classes. If your son has a transcript filled with honors classes, this will be very impressive.
Also, you might already know, that med schools generally don’t discount GPAs from lower ranked schools. So going to a college where he can get the highest GPA possible would be the best choice. I also definitely agree to keep the costs as low as possible – med school can get very expensive.
Your son will evolve as he goes to college. He may/may not want to become a physician. btw- plastic surgery is such a highly desired specialty (lifestyle being a factor?)and it is super competitive among graduating medical students. It is hard enough to get into any medical school, much less an elite one. Then a competitive residency.
Those H’s on the transcript are a perk. So is going to a more elite school. But- for medical school grades, MCAT scores and other factors weigh heavily.
Your son needs to decide his college based on several factors, both academic and other. For academics he needs to figure out what seems to work best for his education. He needs a major, premed is only an intention. That major could lead to his plan B career. He needs to figure out his priorities- getting top grades for possible medical school, taking the best/most rigorous courses for a major and any others.
So many variables. This is where I would, and he should, make lists of pros and cons. A clear winner may show. If not, it does not matter. All of our lives are full of branching points. So many what ifs.
In my opinion Honors Programs like the Business Honors Program at UT Austin command a lot of respect and get kids jobs they may not be able to get if they weren’t in the Honors Program. However, as far as I know Med school admission doesn’t work that way. The primary objective therel is to get the highest possible GPA and making sure you do really well in all the required science courses. They don’t really care Honors or no Honors. Therefore getting into an Honors Program would actually be counterproductive
I would tell him to spend his spare energy on acing the MCAT
Honors matters when course rigor is considered- getting an honors A trumps the regular version. Likewise more weight will be given to more elite schools. However- the A student will have an advantage over the lesser student who may have gone to a more highly ranked school.
The bottom line- choose your school and program for the best education for you. Choose an Honors program for the benefits to you. Many students will not want the more intense focus of honors- one example is theory versus problem based calculus. Most STE majors want good problem solving and it is a better focus than what math majors aim for.
Premed students need a plan B. Never choose a major because of any usefulness for medical school- they require the subjects needed and teach the rest. Many have biology type majors because their interest lie in that- logical for studying humans. But- think outside the box.
Also, keep in mind that if you start in the honors program and then don’t want to continue the whole way you don’t have to.
There are some excellent points here, but I thought of a couple more from my D’s experience that may be helpful.
First, when doing group projects in an Honors course you can be assured that every group member will get their work done on time and the work will be exemplary. Non-honors project groups tend to have at least one slacker and a wide range to the quality of the work.
Second, the Honors sections tend to be immune from grading on a curve. If everyone does A level work, the professors are allowed to give all A grades. Colleges do their best not to punish students for choosing the Honors track.
While I agree with bopper, you can drop honors, but depending on the school and how they set things up, you may have to complete gen eds. In my dd’s program, they were exempt from gen eds unless they dropped out of honors or their honors seminars covered covered some of the gen eds. Several would drop after two years because the second part of their honors program consisted of a two year research project and paper.
One thing about honors programs that I discovered after doing a ton of research is that they are NOT a smaller school within a bigger school. Many of them are still big and, even those that are not, still have the honors kids taking classes with everyone and the classes can still be big. Plus, the minimum ACT/SAT and GPAs may surprise you. Many times, they aren’t all that high. A family friend sent their son to Indiana U and he was in the honors dorm and the honors program. He said that the kids didn’t seem like very serious students and he transferred out for sophomore year. I really, really wanted to find an honors program inside a big U that was more like the liberal arts colleges that our son was drawn to. I thought it would be the best of both worlds. I did buy the book mentioned above and spent quite a bit of time reading it and following up with friends who had kids at these schools and looking at websites. I just never found exactly what S19 was looking for in an honors college. Some hardly offer anything “extra” at all. And some say they offer certain things when the truth is that all students are privy to them. And, at some schools, like Wisconsin and Pitt, anyone can do honors. They are honors programs, not honors colleges.
Our D has been accepted at Loyola as well and we are discussing if she wants to apply to the Honors program. She is thinking she would rather skip it and I don’t know if I will push her to do it —if she does decide to accept the admission to Loyola. If you go to the honors section of the website, you can see the syllabus for a prior class so it gives you an idea of the pacing of the program. It seems to almost have a Great Books feel to it, which I can appreciate, but if the student is hesitant, it would give me reason to pause. I think with my daughter’s case, she’s concerned about the transition to college in general and adding the pressure of the honors program as well is something that is weighing heavily on her. She also did a smaller program within her high school and, over the years, she felt it isolated her from the overall student body.
I think Loyola has a good honors program, it’s just not what is right for us.
Here is another couple of differences between honors programs. Some you join as incoming freshman, others allow you to apply within the first year if you have certain grades. Then again, some do not take transfer students while others do. There seems to be no set template for an honors program.
College versus Program differences as well. My research of them several years ago had me so thankful UW does it the way they do. No one size fits all honors students- just different class options to meet gen ed and major requirements. No honors survey courses substituting for specific subject matter. Why would the lit major and the science major want the same material? Why should there be limits on the type of lit used to meet reqs? So many ways to be rigid or flexible.
As everyone seems to be saying- you need to examine the specific program at the specific school to see if it is worth it. Or if that school is the one.
Thank you everyone for all this great information. DS and I have discussed it and it doesn’t look like the Honor’s Program at Loyola (the website is very informative once you find it) is for him. We’ll be visiting the school in March and are awaiting other schools’ decisions so we’ll see what happens.
Honors programs are not equal to honors colleges. The latter offers exclusive benefits such as preferential enrollment and travel vouchers to visit after acceptance (see ASU and USF) as NMF, Not necessarily apples and oranges, but more mandarins versus tangelos.
My only experience with honors colleges is with ASU Barrett. Barrett students are required to have a certain number of honors credits each year. Those can be earned one of two ways. One way is by taking a regular ASU class but entering into an honors enrichment contract with the professor and doing extra work. https://barretthonors.asu.edu/academics/honors-courses-and-contracts/honors-enrichment-contracts. The other way is to take an Honors Only section of a class. A list of the classes with Honors Only sections for Fall 2018 is here: https://barretthonors.asu.edu/sites/default/files/honors_courses_fall_2018.pdf. So for example there are honors only sections of many common introductory classes such as biology, calculus, psychology, economics. Those sections will be smaller and (obviously) only honors students.
When D toured the ASU Fulton School of Engineering, one of our tour guides was a Barrett student. She described the honors options and gave an example. She said that she felt that Chemistry was not her strong suit. So she took a regular Chemistry class with an honors contract instead of taking the Honors Only section of Chemistry. But that was her choice for that particular class.
The Barrett students all cited the priority registration, dorms and the honors dining hall as perks that they valued.