<p>Can someone please explain honors colleges to me, specifically:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>How much extra work would it be for honors students vs regular students?</p></li>
<li><p>Would coming from an honors college look just as good as coming from a better school as a regular student? Basically, how much would being in honors boost your resume? If I got into the honors college for a lesser school, and also got into the regular college from a better school, which would look better?</p></li>
</ol>
<p>bumppppppp</p>
<p>anyone???</p>
<p>The better school/normal college would look better than lesser school/honors college.</p>
<p>Which honors college are you talking about? You can probably get more specific answers if we know which schools you’re comparing.</p>
<p>I’ve usually thought of state university honors colleges as inexpensive alternatives for gifted students who can’t afford the Ivy League or another top tier private. For example, I was accepted into my state flagship’s (SUNY Binghamton) honors program, even though I was primarily looking at top tier privates. </p>
<p>So to corroborate with pandem, a degree from the normal college at a better school probably looks better than honors college at state u in most employment scenarios. In terms of grad school admissions, however, it probably doesn’t make too much of a difference.</p>
<p>The exception to the rule would probably be the CUNY Honors program, which is extremely competitive and prestigious, at least in NY. I’m sure there are other well-regarded honors programs that I’m unaware of.</p>
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<p>Schreyer at Penn State is similar.</p>
<p>In general, honors colleges offer things like smaller classes, separate residence halls, and more specialized/personal advising. Other things can include more reserearch and internship opportunities.</p>
<p>Sometimes honors college students get first pick of classes.</p>
<p>Honors colleges are often oversold, the glossy pamphlets giving the impression a small LAC has been set up inside a larger university. Honors colleges do offer some very valuable perks and let you meet some of the top students at your college. But when you’re thinking of honors colleges the pitch is often that you’re getting an elite private education at the public school price. Regrettably this isn’t really the case and future employers/grad-schools know this.</p>
<p>Depending on the U’s program, what they offer may range from taking separate honors classes to taking just one honors seminar per semester. Some of the honors offerings may just be a special discussion section of the regular class (at many U’s classes can have 100-500 students, then everyone meets once a week in a smaller group with a TA). You really need to dig in to find what a particular school offers. And keep in mind honors college programs typically offer the small classes and top profs the brochures promise during the 1st two years of college, because it doesn’t take that many classes to come up with a set that will meet the lower-division requirements for most majors.</p>
<p>It is rare to find more than a token amount of offerings upper-division since the honors program simply doesn’t have enough faculty members to duplicate an entire major or set of majors. So the last two years most/all classes are taken with the rest of the students in the regular U’s classes. The teaching of the profs will be geared towards that level, the discussions and student involvement in class will be dominated by the regular students, and so on. And class sizes may balloon, too, if you’re in a larger public U and a popular major. Peer effects are big, too; when almost everyone around you at school is a strong student you have lots of good examples of how hard to work, of extras like doing research or internships to get a leg up for post-college. If the top kids are a few hundred strong dispersed among tens of thousands at the U then good examples may be harder to see. When it comes to finding a job, employers are less likely to send recruiters to campus with a limited number of honors college seniors compared to the campus-full they’ll find at more highly regarded schools.</p>
<p>Honors colleges do offer some valuable perks in addition to the classes. Typical ones include registering for classes before everyone else so you get the classes you want (a perk worth its weight in gold!), special counselors, guaranteed housing, special library privileges. They will stamp your diploma with some indication of honors college or make a note on your transcript. But I would be skeptical of attending a college for its honors program in place of a more highly regarded U if finances are not an issue.</p>
<p>What he said :)</p>
<p>Another way to think about it is: If you went to a regular high school and took mostly honors classes, you were mainly exposed to the top 10% of the people even though there were a lot of other people at your high school. </p>
<p>At college this 10% goes down to less than 1%, and you (as mikemac mentioned) are obliged to take a lot of classes with the majority of the student body, making it hard (though not impossible) to get a more rigorous education. </p>
<p>One point that wasn’t touched on is that if you choose to go to an honors college over a more “prestigious” school, it may be easier for you to get a professors attention.</p>
<p>“At colleges this 10% goes down to less than 1%”</p>
<p>How is that?</p>
<p>^ This bashing of honors colleges is (I suspect) coming from people who never attended one. I did. I attended the University of Michigan’s honors program some years ago—too many, but it hasn’t changed that much. (They don’t call it an honors “college” there, but it’s the same idea). Generally, admission to Michigan’s honors program is extended to the top 10% of the incoming class, though not everyone accepts. The stats of the kids in the Michigan honors program are equal or better to those of the freshman class at the top-ranked LACs, HYPMS, Duke, etc. There are several benefits, some of which have been mentioned: honors-only freshman classes, an honors-only accelerated math sequence, special honors-only courses and seminars in almost every department, honors sections in larger lecture classes with the discussion section led by the professor rather than a TA (should you decide to take any large lecture classes, but you don’t need to do so if you prefer not to), individualized honors advising at both the underclass level through the honors program and at the upperclass level through an honors adviser assigned by your major department, expedited opportunities to do faculty-supervised research, and (optional) separate honors-only housing. Most departments have their own department-specific upperclass honors requirements which include honors seminars and classes, accelerated progression through upper-level courses including the opportunity to take graduate-level courses in your junior and senior years, and in many fields a senior honors thesis with individualized supervision by a faculty member.</p>
<p>I’d emphasize a couple of things. First, the exact nature of the honors program or honors college varies enormously by university; don’t accept gross generalizations like “the last two years most/all classes are taken with the students in the regular U’s classes” because that may or may not be true (and certainly was NOT my experience as most of my junior and senior classes were small classes of 10-15 students taken with other honors students and/or alongside graduate students in my field at one of the top-ranked graduate programs in the country). Nor should you unthinkingly assume all honors programs are great; some are pretty cosmetic, some are truly outstanding.</p>
<p>I agree that being in the honors program at an otherwise very strong school like Michigan doesn’t exactly replicate the LAC experience. But my own experience was that, for me at least, it was better, given my academic and other interests. And as a state resident it was an extraordinary bargain. I lived, worked, and played alongside students who were as smart as any in the country. I took only 2 or 3 large lecture classes, and I took those not becuase I needed to but because the professors had well-deserved reputations for being outstanding teachers (and don’t kid yourself, you’ll find similar large and popular lecture classes at the Ivies, too; they boast about them on the tours). I said at the time and maintain to this day that in my chosen field of study, there were probably only 3 or 4 schools in the country that could have given me a comparably broad and deep education in my major field, and as those 3 or 4 were not nearly as generous with financial aid as they are today, the University of Michigan honors program was absolutely the best place in the country for me to be—bar none. I’m sure that’s not everyone’s experience even at Michigan (where it might depend somewhat on your major field—just as at any private), and I’m sure many honors programs are not nearly as strong, not least because few schools can match Michigan’s extraordinarily strong faculty. But it’s an option worthy of careful investigation if you can pay in-state tuition or get merit scholarships. Be careful, though; you’ve got to scratch the surface to see how much red meat there is behind the promises, and what is the top level of academic quality you can achieve at the institution even with the honors program.</p>
<p>Are there any lists out there of strong honors colleges throghout the country. For financial reasons I like the idea of an honors college at a state university but dont want to sacrifice the quality or rigor of my education. Any help? (I live in Washington state)</p>
<p>Oops, didn’t know that many people were accepted to the honors college in a particular school. </p>
<p>@bclintonk, I don’t think that you can consider U Mich to be a standard state school. A lot of people (particularly ones from instate) are always some of the strongest in any given year. </p>
<p>Additionally, you can find brilliant kids at any school because every school has a certain amount of resources to make sure that it gets them. In fact a few friends of mine turned down ivys or comparable schools for state schools that offered them full rides.</p>
<p>Fundementally you said it really well. The most important question to answer is:
“to see how much red meat there is behind the promises, and what is the top level of academic quality you can achieve at the institution even with the honors program.”</p>
<p>bclintonk majored in Philosophy and by his telling received an excellent education on par with what is available anywhere, at least as far as classes go. Thru his program he was able to take grad courses, get to know profs well, etc (according to what he’s posted). If you’re as sure of your future as bclintonk appeared to be, and you find a program in your field that offers the advantages he got, by all means jump at it!! </p>
<p>That said, you go to a top LAC or private and most of the kids around you are of top caliber, not just the small number in the honors program in your major. So much of what you learn, the examples you see of how to succeed academically and in entering a career, the connections & friendships you make, are forged by what’s available to you. And perhaps you’d prefer to take undergrad courses your undergrad years, just like your peers are doing at the top institutions honors programs like to compare themselves to. Not part of the bclintok plan.
While he urges you “not to accept” this, the fact is indeed what happens at most programs. Just go to the websites of the programs you are considering and look at what they offer upper-division. Caveat emptor … Even in bclintok’s case he had to jump to the grad program to get those great classes. Had he stuck with the regular undergrad Philosophy program, what I’ve written is no doubt true even at the vaunted UofM Honors program.</p>
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And another thing worth knowing that bclintok won’t tell you. When he writes this, he doesn’t tell you anything about the size of his department or how many degrees they awarded. Just for grins, I decided to check. bclintok has written in the past that he studied Philosophy, which graduated 49 students in 2008 (out of 6258 Bachelor’s degrees awarded) at UofM. Not even 1% of the graduating students picked this major. <a href=“http://sitemaker.umich.edu/obpinfo/files/umaa_degrsbystudyfield_08.pdf[/url]”>Office of Budget and Planning;
<p>So it shouldn’t be surprising that “most of my junior and senior classes were small”. So what is the takeaway from bclintok’s post? Pick an obscure major at even the largest U and you’ll get small classes? With 24 tenured professors listed on the website and 49 students graduating, small classes are indeed on the agenda. That’s great, but what about the 99+% of people majoring in something else? If you think you can generalize from his experience to the typical honors program be my guest, but an anecdotal account of 1 person in a seldom-chosen major doesn’t seem to be to be very revealing about honors programs.</p>
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<p>Very cleverly misleading statistics, mikemac. Here are some additional facts. The Honors Program at Michigan is a division of the College of Literature, Science & the Arts which comprises about 60% of Michigan’s undergraduates and awards about 60% of Michigan’s undergraduate degrees—so the relevant “denominator” is something like 3,755, not 6,258. (The rest are in the schools of business, engineering, music, nursing, etc, all irrelevant to any discussion of the Honors Program). Within LS&A there are some 70 majors available—far more than you’ll find at any LAC or most smaller research universities. If you do the math, you’ll see that on average,with 70 majors, there are about 54 degrees awarded per major per year. That makes philosophy about an average-sized undergraduate major at Michigan, smaller than some but probably larger than most. Now it’s true that some majors are much bigger. Poli. sci., psych, and pre-med tend to be much bigger, for example, and I don’t have first-hand experience with how the honors program works in those majors, though I’ve said before I’d be a little wary of going to a big university to study an extremely popular major. On the other hand, those departments tend to have even more faculty than a department like philosophy, so it may be that in the end the experience for honors majors ends up being pretty similar. </p>
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<p>Caveat emptor??? My point is, being able to “jump to the grad program” is routine for high-performing undergrads at Michigan, certainly if they start out in the honors program, but even otherwise if they excel at their undergraduate studies. That’s just exactly what it means to “stick with undergrad Philosophy” at a place like Michigan—if you’re capable of doing the work, you can do accelerated studies in small classes with top students, and your departmental honors adviser will steer you in that direction and help you chart your path. That’s not a negative, that’s a positive. The top end is not yet another course out of a limited curriculum with one of the same small handful of professors in your major while you bide your time waiting for grad school. The top end is being able to do graduate-level work in one of the top graduate programs in the nation (which Michigan has in virtually every academic discipline) as an undergraduate. That experience is not unique to me—it’s routine for honors students at Michigan. So, “caveat emptor,” I guess: if you want the challenge of a truly accelerated undergraduate education, consider the honors option at a school like Michigan with extraordinary faculty in every field imaginable. Sky’s the limit.</p>
<p>But as I said before, I don’t think the Michigan experience is necessarily representative of all honors programs, because most schools don’t have Michigan’s faculty. Examine the school and the program carefully before you buy. Just as you should do with LACs and smaller research universities. It’s not the type of school, it’s the school itself that counts.</p>
<p>And for anyone interested, here’s a description of Michigan’s honors program in math:</p>
<p>[UM</a> Mathematics-About Honors](<a href=“http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/undergrad/abouthonors.shtml]UM”>http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/undergrad/abouthonors.shtml)</p>
<p>Again, few public university honors programs will be able to match this, because few have the faculty to carry it off. But then, only a few private colleges and universities will be able to match this—because few have the faculty to carry it off.</p>
<p>I just want to say how frustrating it is for me (as a parent) to get straight information about honors colleges. Probably the safest thing to say is that there is a lot of variation between programs. Some of them are just a page on a website or a glossy pamphlet. Some are well thought out and really make a big difference in the undergraduate experience.</p>
<p>For instance University of Georgia seems to have an excellent program. University of Arizona appears to be a page on a website.</p>