The current political moment in the United States puts an exclamation point on years of growing concern for our civic culture. We have a president who neither understands nor cares for the processes and norms of the American system of government, a Congress that seems almost indifferent to the real issues of governing for the public good, a news…

Recent studies on advising show considerable agreement about the sorts of practices that constitute good advising, whether by a professional staff advisor, an official faculty advisor, or an unofficial faculty mentor. These practices include creating a welcoming atmosphere, building a trusting relationship, and helping the student find resources…

"I don't know that many kids that have done coke, none that have tried crack, and only a few that have dropped acid. I can't even count all of the ones who've taken Adderall" (Stice). This statement made in an interview by a freshman art history major at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2007 effectively highlights a still…

Improving rates of honors program completion is a goal of virtually all honors directors and deans, and research can help identify and evaluate promising strategies. A number of recent empirical studies have investigated predictors of program completion, including students' admission credentials and honors program features. Though specific…

Many assume that moving honors students into separate sections adversely affects the academic performance of non-honors students, an assumption the authors faced at their institution. In the context of a study done in a college of engineering, that perception is even stronger because peer-to-peer and group projects are such important pedagogical…

Thriving--defined as academic, psychological, and interpersonal wellbeing and engagement (Schreiner, "Thriving: Expanding")--is a recent concept that expands the traditional approach of measuring college student success, which has historically been measured by such cognitive measures as GPA. The main purpose of the present study was to…

In addressing mental health needs in honors communities, I first need to explain that I am not a mental health practitioner; I am a sociologist. The types of issues that interest me are structural: what can we do to set up supportive environments that help all our students. We need to respond appropriately to individuals, but we also need also to…

In the autumn of 2014, the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) launched the "Admissions, Retention, and Completion Survey" (ARC) in an attempt to collect for the first time honors program benchmarking data on important admissions, persistence, and completion metrics, data that are already widely used throughout higher education…

Most enrollment management systems today use historical data to build rough forecasts of what percentage of students will likely accept an offer of enrollment based on historical acceptance rates. While this aggregate forecast method has its uses, we propose that building an enrollment model based on predicting an individual's likelihood of…

The primary purpose of the current study was to explore the nature and process of transformation as described by students in their stories of first-semester experiences and to compare these processes to those outlined in transformative learning models in order to examine the degree to which they correlate. The secondary goal was to investigate how…

So far, few articles about innovations in Dutch or American honors programs appear to link their findings to an existing body of research about innovations in higher education in general. Although scholars are starting to make this connection more and more (see Kallenberg; NRO, "Excellentie" and "EXChange"; NWO,…

In spring 2017, Ervin Malakaj (Assistant Professor of German) and Jeffrey L. Littlejohn (Professor of History) led a Difficult Dialogues seminar on #BlackLivesMatter for the Sam Houston State University (SHSU) Honors College. The seminar considered the complex historical, economic, and cultural forces that produced the movement along with the…

The five-paragraph essay is a hard genre to love. Its inverted-triangle intro has enlightened us with too many "dawns" of some monolithic "man." It reduces arguments, which tend to be rather subtle creatures, to the confines of a single-sentence thesis. It confects arguments in bland triplicate structure, as if any claim could…

Many honors programs make admissions decisions based on student high school GPA and a standardized test score. However, McKay argued that standardized test scores can be a barrier to honors program participation, particularly for minority students. Minority students, particularly Hispanic and African American students, are apt to have lower…

When I was appointed fellowships advisor at UAB back in the late 1990s and before the formation of the National Association of Fellowships Advisors, as a first order of business I spoke with the university's few former winners and finalists about their experiences applying for nationally competitive scholarships. One such former applicant, now an…