Honors programs, as home to the highest test scores and highest GPAs on many campuses (for reasons that are not particularly justifiable), can become assembly lines for prestige-scholarship applications and their dangling appendages, the applicants themselves. As honors programs become cogs in universities' PR machines, they decouple from their deeper and more important missions. In this article, the author discusses some disquieting conclusions he has reached about prestige scholarships through his own experiences as a candidate, as an advisor to multiple nominees, via personal and family knowledge of nearly twenty Rhodes Scholars ranging from the Class of 1910 to the Class of 2000, and during twenty years as a faculty member at two universities.