@collegemom27 The main advantage of the program is that you are automatically admitted into the Business Honors Program if you maintain a 3.5 GPA through your first year (not that hard to do if you are qualified) for ACE. The Business Honors Program is hard to get into if you aren’t in ACE, and it is a long application process with many different components, so it is a huge advantage. The Business Honors Program lets you take Honors with other honors students, so you will likely have a better group and better experience overall. Honors classes often have better professors and grade distribution without actually being that much harder, but you can still take honors classes if you are in Hutton even if not in Business Honors. There are also minor things like access to lunch and learns to learn more about Kelley and/or different companies that provide free food, and having the same group for both Honors Computer in Business and Business Presentations is nice because it is easier to coordinate meetings. Being in ACE requires you to take those 2 classes in the same semester with only ACE students, but the classes are essentially the same as the non ACE sections of them.
I think I read somewhere that it did help with getting into the KLLC, but I got into ACE and denied from the LLC so you are not guaranteed. Honestly, living in the KLLC isn’t as big of a deal as people make it out to be. I have lots of friends there and they say the main advantage is that it is very easy to meet other business students. Other than that, they are indifferent about the KLLC. I would still apply, but don’t be too disappointed if you don’t get in. Kelley was my first choice, and I chose to turn down a full tuition scholarship to Manchester University (small Indiana private school with a good accounting program) to pay $3000/year in tuition here, and I am happy with that decision. I wouldn’t pay tons and tons of money to be here if I had other good options though.
Last year there was one optional meeting during orientation, but I would have had to come down a day early and decided to skip it. There are a good mix of in state and out of state. In my group of 6, 4 were in state, and overall it’s probably close to half