This essay demonstrates that the honors community is still primarily focused on maintaining the highest levels of academic quality and integrity, but this focus is in sharp contrast to the national dialogue outside academia that more often focuses on mere completion or credentials. The author, Jerry Herron of the honors college at Wayne State University, advocates addressing academic quality through more sophisticated, evidence-based admissions policies that predict student success. The overarching theme of the essay is to inquire how honors administrators predict student success and how they use that predictive power wisely and objectively to admit students and maintain quality. A well-conceived admissions policy tells honors administrators much more than whom to recruit; it becomes the basis for a quantitative defense of what is done with data and puts a convincing dollar value on the good teachings of excellence.