Ask students enrolled in the University of South Carolina’s honors college why they chose it, and most will offer essentially the same explanation: Being here is like being at a small private liberal-arts college and a big public research university simultaneously.
“I like small class sizes, but I like a large college,” says JonLuke Boggs, a freshman.
Jeet Gurum, a senior studying biology, economics, and political science, says he has enjoyed “all of the attention and faculty interaction you would get at a small college,” plus “a lot of research opportunities.”
It is no accident that the students here at the South Carolina Honors College think of it in such terms. Back when they were in high school, it marketed itself to them as a place where they could take classes with just eight or 10 other students and then join a crowd of 80,000 in the football stadium. “‘It is the best of both worlds’ is how we try to sell it,” says R. Scott Verzyl, the university’s director of undergraduate admissions.
More than 70 other such university-affiliated honors colleges have cropped up around the country, their numbers growing rapidly since the mid-1990s. And most of the 35 responding to a 2004 survey by the National Collegiate Honors Council—an association of honors colleges and programs and their employees—used a similar “best of both worlds” recruitment pitch. In keeping with their efforts to offer key features of a liberal-arts college, about 90 percent had separate residential housing for honors students, and a solid majority reported offering honors seminars and requiring honors students to complete a senior thesis or project.
But are such honors colleges truly a source of new hope for liberal learning? Or do they represent something else entirely—perhaps even an emerging threat to it? The answer depends on whether the goal is preserving liberal-arts colleges or promoting access to the educational experience they offer, even if that means diluting it to get more students through the door.
Straddling the Fence
National experts on honors colleges can name only one that is both university-affiliated and a free-standing liberal-arts institution: the Wilkes Honors College, operated by Florida Atlantic University on its Jupiter, Fla., campus. Established by the Florida Legislature in 1999, it hires its own faculty members, has autonomy over its curriculum, and focuses almost solely on the liberal arts and sciences.
Most other honors colleges are like the University of South Carolina’s—which was one of the first, established in 1978—in that they were fashioned by universities out of existing honors programs. Similarly, most are led by deans and rely on various academic departments to provide their classes.
By and large, the students at such honors colleges major in a wide range of disciplines—including many unrelated to the liberal arts—even though a disproportionate share of the honors classes are liberal-arts-focused. “Their education in the honors college is about broadening their experience,” says Rosalie C. Otero, director of the University of New Mexico’s honors program and a former president of the national honors council.
Just over half of the approximately 1,260 students at South Carolina Honors College are majoring in the liberal arts, a proportion in line with the rest of the Columbia campus’s undergraduate enrollment of about 20,000. Nearly a fourth of its other students are business majors, with the remainder split among other professional programs.
The hybrid nature of the honors college appeals to students who are not sure what they want to study or are worried that majoring in the liberal arts will hurt them in the job market, says Mr. Verzyl, the admissions director. “I am not entirely sure that every 17-year-old out there really understands what it means to go to a liberal-arts college versus a comprehensive university,” he says. “I think they want some flexibility.”
The approach helps South Carolina enroll students who were considering other research universities and gives them the sort of liberal education they otherwise might have missed. But it also helps the university draw applicants away from other liberal-arts institutions in the region, such as Davidson College, in North Carolina, and Furman University and Wofford College, in its own state.
Trickle-Down Benefits
The honors college “really attempts to focus on providing that elite, liberal-arts-college experience,” says Mary Anne Fitzpatrick, dean of South Carolina’s College of Arts and Sciences. It houses honors students in a separate dormitory to tie together its living and learning environments, encourages students to engage in service learning, requires them to complete a senior thesis or senior project, and fosters close relationships with professors. Many advocates of liberal-arts education say its value lies mainly in such learning experiences, and not necessarily in the content of liberal-arts classes. Students will develop critical-thinking skills better in a small seminar on journalism, for example, than they will studying English literature in a crammed lecture hall.
Offering much smaller classes than the rest of the university requires some budgetary maneuvering. The honors college transfers much of its $3-million budget to other academic departments to offset the higher costs of honors classes, charging its students an additional $300 per semester to help generate such funds.
Davis Baird, dean of the honors college, says its presence pays off for the university. By encouraging faculty members to develop boutique courses with titles such as “Ethics of Food” and “Civility and the Public Sphere,” it serves as an incubator for curriculum innovations that can benefit the broader student body. And its students, who must meet significantly higher admissions standards than others at the university, help raise South Carolina’s academic profile and are disproportionately represented among the university’s student leaders.
“The college benefits the overall student-body culture,” Mr. Baird says. “We take a lot of resources,” but “that said, we give a lot back to the university.”
