To be in honors is to be engaged in many different economic arrangements and exchanges. Honors educators work in concert with their admissions offices while recruiting high-achieving students whose decisions often hinge on how much money the institution can offer in the form of discounts to tuition and financial aid. Honors programs that tie scholarships more directly to honors admission deal with an even more vexed question: do they love us for our innovative learning or for our money? Honors educators that do not have faculty lines in honors must typically "buy" the services of colleagues in other departments or hire adjuncts to staff classes. In fact, they spend much of their time as honors administrators tracking numbers tied to financial considerations: protecting their budgets, cultivating donations, massaging the entering honors class to hit prearranged recruiting targets, keeping up FTEs, and watching endowment returns if they are lucky enough to benefit from such support. In calling their customers "students" academics is like other industries that use language to disguise the fact that the professional relationships within those fields are centered in economic transactions in which individuals pay for a service. This article focuses on why educators engage in this practice and suggests the potential benefits of highlighting some of the economic advantages of honors to institutions, engaging faculty more overtly in the economics of their universities, and foregrounding discussions about monetary matters in educators' meetings and publications.