<p>What is the retention like for the honors program? Do people love it and stick with it? Or do they come and go? Anyone with thoughts on this?</p>
<p>My d (who will be freshman honors + Carolina Scholar this fall) did an overnight visit at Carolina last week as a guest of a sophmore honors student. She met a lot of other honors kids in the dorm, classes and at an honors board meeting. One piece of advice given her by some of the honors students was to make friends with other honors students, "you know they'll be coming back the next year". My d said that they seemed to be a pretty close knit group and enjoyed the classes and times that they had together. A number of them had taken advantage of honors study abroad programs and had traveled together. She said that it did seem that you could be as involved or uninvolved as you chose in the honors program. The students she met were really involved in honors both in and out of class. While this isn't first hand experience, my d was quite impressed with her visit and everyone she met. She can't wait for August!</p>
<p>uncw&m that all sounds good. But do people return to the program because it's true the classes are smaller and more engaging? It would stink to end up in courses where they pile it on just so they can call it "honors". Since you don't get extra credit or more quality points is the extra work worth it? Current honors students please chime in here.</p>
<p>All the honors classes I have taken or heard about have all been discussion based classes that are small with good professors. I don't think people ever leave the program because they are disatisfied with the courses themselves, really. On the other hand, a lot of people do drop out of the program because of course selection. Once you get into your major towards the end of sophomore year, it becomes hard to fit the relatively limited offerings of the honors program into your schedule, and since taking honors classes has nothing to do with graduating with honors, people just don't bother and drop out of the program. Mainly for that reason, the honors porgram is much more centered around first and second year students than juniors and seniors.</p>
<p>Following up the comments by luxlibertas, here's an article written in the DTH today about a new "honors contract," instituted with the idea of keeping more juniors and seniors honors students active.
<a href="http://media.www.dailytarheel.com/media/storage/paper885/news/2007/04/18/University/Regular.Courses.Can.Be.Supplemented.For.Honors-2848119.shtml?reffeature=htmlemailedition%5B/url%5D">http://media.www.dailytarheel.com/media/storage/paper885/news/2007/04/18/University/Regular.Courses.Can.Be.Supplemented.For.Honors-2848119.shtml?reffeature=htmlemailedition</a></p>
<p>One of my friends is a freshman currently in the honor's program and he said he's dropping out of it. It's not that it's too hard for him or anything like that (he got a 3.9GPA there last semester) but he said that he doesn't have the room in his schedule to take the mandatory honors class.</p>