U of Hawaii Manoa - honors program

College Search & Selection
1

Anyone know about the quality of the honors program at U of Hawaii at Manoa (assuming my son can get in)? Does it prepare students well for graduate school/research? Are the honors courses good? Is the advising consistently good and regular? And can a student study abroad for a year and still be in the honors program?

Background: My senior would benefit most from a smallish college with good academic advising, personalized attention and small class sizes. He will also need some accommodations for ADHD, primarily extra time. We want a school that has a good amount of diversity (he identifies as African American but is Asian biracial). His weighted GPA is >4.0 (sorry, not sure the exact number), he will have 5 APs (As and Bs); SAT 660 verbal, 680 math; 2-yr dual enrollment genomics program (which means he has 5 yearlong courses of biosciences but only 1 chem and NO physics); 3 yrs of Spanish thru Spanish 4 (no AP/Spanish 5 at his school); 3 yrs of math thru AP Calc; varsity soccer and tennis; 1 summer community service with a Spanish immersion/youth leadership/community development program; 1 summer teaching assistant job w/program for middle school students at risk. We will need financial aid for private colleges (his first choice is Occidental College) so we are looking at state schools (UCs) but they are large and he will be lost, unless he can get into a good honors program here in CA or get a merit award or WUE tuition at another state school. He wants to major in biology and eventually go to graduate school for genomics research.

If you have suggestions for other schools and/or honors programs, I’d love to hear about those, too.

Thanks.

2

University of Hawaii Manoa is not exactly small, with about 13,000 undergraduates and 5,000 graduates.

Also, biology is a popular major, and many biology major courses overlap with pre-med requirements, so the courses can be expected to be on the large side relative to those at the same college.

3

Thanks. Good point about the bio classes. The honors program website says they have about 700 students and only 20 students in their courses, which fulfill general ed requirements. He would still have to survive the large bio classes, though. Hm.

4

If he has great AP scores he won’t have that many GE reqs anyway? Honors college in my state WUE school is baffling really, it doesn’t seem to offer any tangible benefit to kids that have rigorous high school curriculums.