Characteristics of the Contemporary Honors College* A Descriptive Analysis of a Survey of NCHC Member Colleges

INTRODUCTION Every year the number of honors colleges across the country increases. Most of these new colleges emerge out of pre-existing honors programs, an origin that suggests that the change reflects an interest in raising the public profile of honors education at a particular institution. Sometimes this transformation entails only a cosmetic name change; other times, institutions take the opportunity to review what they are providing in honors education and how they might enhance it. The Executive Committee of the National Collegiate Honors Council recognized that the NCHC ought to take a strong interest in this phenomenon. If an institution is simply gilding the name, then "honors college" becomes a devalued misnomer designed as a marketing strategy and intended to mislead potential applicants into believing that something new exists where, in fact, substance remains unchanged. Passive acceptance of this trend also does a disservice to those exceptional honors programs that resist playing the name change game because they deem that their program as it stands serves their institution well. Nonetheless, four-year programs at universities face increasing competitive pressure to enter the collegiate game. Unfortunately, until recently the game lacked a referee. In the absence of some commonly agreed-upon criteria, honors administrators often found themselves in a weak negotiating position when asked, or required, to make the name change. If anything goes, then normal institutional inertia means nothing will change except the name. Similar concerns motivated NCHC to develop "Basic Characteristics of a Fully Developed Honors Program" over a decade ago. Rumors of the conflict over these guidelines echo down the years and made people reluctant to engage in a similar debate over "honors college." Unlike "honors program," however, an honors college is a particular subset of the larger species and is neither relevant to nor desirable for all institutional settings. Nonetheless, those institutions that have made or are contemplating the transformation ought to be expected to make more than a rhetorical change. Consequently, in November 2003, then NCHC President Norm Weiner reconstituted the NCHC Ad Hoc Task Force on Honors Colleges and charged it with the task of developing a draft set of "The Basic Characteristics of a Fully Developed Honors College" for discussion at the 2004 National Conference in New Orleans. (1) This draft was accepted by the Executive Committee in November 2004 and formally endorsed as modified at their June 2005 meeting (see Appendix). The task force also reported on their survey of existing honors colleges affiliated with the NCHC and assessed the extent to which certain characteristics are widely shared among putative honors colleges. What follows is a preliminary descriptive analysis of the findings of this survey. METHODOLOGYAND LIMITATIONS OF THE SURVEY Our survey is limited in a number of ways that necessarily infuse our conclusions with a degree of tentativeness. The most basic issue involved determining our survey population. We considered trying to identify all the entities that are self-declared "honors colleges," regardless of whether they were affiliated with the NCHC. Given our limited time and resources, this task proved daunting and ultimately impossible to implement. In addition, we concluded that even if we could identify something that would pass for the whole population of honors colleges, we should not give non-affiliated institutions a voice at this stage of our deliberations. We decided, then, to survey those NCHC members who were listed in the national database as possessing honors colleges. While this decision gave us a manageable sample of 65 schools, subsequent problems arose in conducting the survey. First, the list was not accurate. Ultimately, we found that some colleges we knew to exist were not included on it. …