THE HONORS COLLEGE

By Jeannette Bonjour

Congratulations! You are ready to enroll in classes for your senior year, and you may already be looking at colleges. In fact, you are probably already receiving information from schools. Taking several honors classes each year, as well as participating in your school’s athletic, arts and/or volunteer programs has not always been easy, but you wanted a challenge. Now that college is looming in your not-so-distant future, you want to continue to submerse yourself in a rigorous academic environment, and you would like to know what your options are. As far as your college experience goes, one possibility that you should seriously consider is enrollment in an honors college.

An honors college, or HC, is a small liberal arts college within a larger college or university. The HC offers a more rigorous curriculum than that of the larger school, and it usually has a supportive faculty and community component built in. You will probably take all or mostly all honors classes, and you will work toward a degree that will show the world you spent your undergraduate years challenging yourself academically—including doing in-depth research, writing and reading—as well as personally (since many honors colleges require community service as part of their programs).

Most honors colleges require you to maintain a minimum GPA in order to remain in the program. Clark Honors College at the University or Oregon, for example, requires its students to “maintain a minimum cumulative GPA of 3.0 for all coursework, not just HC classes.” The tuition is usually the same for students enrolled in the HC as it is for every other student at the college or university; however, some honors colleges require some sort of resource fee, which can be as high as $700 per term. This fee can sometimes be covered by scholarships or other types of financial aid.

One important benefit of most honors colleges is small class size. At the Wilkes Honors College on the campus of Florida Atlantic University, the student-to-faculty ratio is 12-to-1, and “students have the opportunity to work on research one-on-one with [...] faculty...” The Honors College at the University of Oklahoma promises that no class will be “larger than 19 students.” With traditional lecture classes at the freshman and sophomore levels sometimes holding upward of 300 students, this much lower ratio, and the personalized attention it allows, will surely benefit you.

Honors colleges, of course, are looking for students who have achieved academic success in high school. However, they are not looking solely at your grade point average; the rigor of the classes you take in high school makes a big difference. Wilkes, for example, looks for “evidence that students have sought out the most challenging high school courses,” which means that the B you earn senior year in AP calculus is going to mean more than the A somebody else earns in algebra II.

In addition to grades, the HC traditionally seeks what Chris Brady, the dean of Schreyer Honors College at Penn State, calls, “men and women of integrity, of high moral character, who employ their knowledge and skills for (the) betterment of society.” Likewise, Wilkes’ ideal candidates are “talented and energetic people who will take advantage of what the Honors College has to offer and who have something to offer in return.” In other words, the sort of person you are matters a great deal. Not only should you be prepared for challenging, in-depth coursework and discussion, but you must be ready to prove yourself as a morally upright young person—one who plans to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the HC experience to do good and important things in the world once you graduate.

University Honors College at the University of Pittsburgh is set up a bit differently. There is no separate building, per se, but “rather, you become an honors college student by taking more challenging courses than your peers and tapping into (their) resources, which are dedicated to enriching the education of the best and brightest Pitt has to offer.”

The benefits of the honors college experience are extraordinary, both during your college years and beyond. While in college, you will have the chance to participate in activities within the honors college. These range from the Student Honors Activity Council and a variety of student publications at Pitt, to the Honors Players (a drama troupe) and Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Arizona. In addition, most honors colleges offer separate residence or scholarship halls for those students who “choose to live in the Honors Community because of the academic and social opportunities that exist to connect with other Honors students,” as the Honors College web site states.

Of course, the more demanding the coursework—and the better you do at rising to those challenges—the better prepared you will be for the world of work. And employers, graduate schools and professional schools will all understand and appreciate the fact that you made the choice at a young age to aim high. So go ahead and take the plunge: enroll in one or more AP courses for your senior year, and look into an honors college program for your postsecondary experience! You’ll be glad you did.