Do you think invitations to honors colleges can be used as a predictor for remaining application results from other schools?
Hypothetically, if you do not get an invite to an honors college at a school with rolling admissions, is that a sign that your applications to highly selective/rejective schools will not work out for you? This is with the assumption this person’s stats/profile are above the stated honors profile and in-line with the highly selective/rejective schools.
Does anyone have any stories of Oh yes, I didn’t get into honors at “X” school, but I did get accepted to “Y” school?
Some honors colleges are more selective than others. One daughter got into honors at UCONN, UDel, and Villanova, but not at UMASS or Rutgers (there were more but it’s been years).
My S24 was not admitted to Honors at Pitt, but was admitted RD to WashU (which he chose), was offered the Monroe at William & Mary, a merit scholarship from Rochester, was also admitted to Vassar, Carleton, and Haverford, St Andrews in Scotland, and Wake Forest.
To be very blunt, I don’t think he did a great job applying for Honors at Pitt. He also originally did not get any merit from Pitt, but they did belatedly offer him a bit.
I note by reputation in my circles, Pitt can also be a bit funny about both Honors and merit in the sense they supposedly may not play those cards with kids they don’t really think are likely to yield. They do admit them, though.
There are all completely independent decisions on the part of the college.
There are some Honors programs which are highly selective and others which are not; there are some where the application gets scrutinized and others where anyone with a GPA over X and scores over Y will get invited.
So no, not a predictive measure. And not worth trying to read the tea leaves!
I think that different schools make different decisions for a wide variety of reasons. In general schools are looking for students who will be a good fit for them, and they seem to get it right quite often. For honors colleges I think that this can be used as a way to entice a student to accept an admissions offer, which suggests that the school does think that this particular student is a good fit. However, that does not mean that some other school will make the same decision.
This is a time of year when many high school seniors just need to be patient and wait as the results come in. At least in my experience this does seem to work out quite often, even if it does not always work out exactly the way that the student was originally hoping.
Schools also have different ways of viewing and classifying a student’s application, and sometimes the less selective institutions aren’t as sophisticated in how information is interpreted.
For example, my kids have run into the issue that our HS doesn’t list a weighted GPA, and some public universities just use “whatever GPA is listed on the HS transcript.” So my kid’s unweighted 3.98 gets compared to another kid’s weighted 4.5, etc. (And some schools even use 4.3 for an A+ which makes even the unweighted GPA go over 4.0.) A more holistic process at a more selective institution would evaluate each GPA in the context of the HS.
Agreed with the others about “not useful as predictive measure”. As the complement to @NiceUnparticularMan’s anecdote, both of my 2025s were offered Honors at Pitt, but neither was subsequently admitted RD to WashU. Both did get in to W&M (one with Monroe), which they both chose, and also into Carleton, which was their close #2. So as tempting as it is to look for early indicators, I think it’s not necessarily a reliable one.
Yes, this is where the thought and effort involved in putting together a really robust list typically pays off. Most kids who apply to a lot of selective colleges get various decisions that are not expected, including in relationship to each other. But when the dust settles you hopefully have a nice set of offers to choose from. And the ones that didn’t come through are just irrelevant.
But I get at this point, kids can get nervous. Trusting the process is a nice idea in theory, but can be stressful as it is still unfolding.
Even without an honors college invite (yet), it still helps to have those rolling admissions in the bag. With both S23 and D26 at this point in the process, I noticed a lot of “even if I don’t get in anywhere else, I’m going to college!”
Agree with others on here that honors college invitations (or not) do not tell the story of the entire application season.
In our household, my youngest was not offered admittance to Schreyers honors college at PSU or (if I am remembering correctly) the honors college at UMN. They were offered honors at UMD, UMass-Amherst, and at least one other state flagship. Kiddo was also admitted to Princeton, Stanford, UMich, Cornell, etc. So, independent processes at different schools!
Also: every honors college with restrictions on #s that I’ve heard of tries to spread around admission to the honors college by major or college. That is, they do not want 90 percent of their HC students in just a few majors.
One of my sons was a competitive applicant for highly selective universities. He just graduated last May from a US News Top 10 school. We lived in Florida, he attended high school in Florida, so he also applied to Florida universities. He was accepted by UF and their Honors Program. He was accepted FSU but rejected by their Honors Program. We got the FSU decision first and it scared the heck out of all of us, wondering if he would even be accepted by UF.
And to add to this fine point- not every major will be able to take advantage of Honors College. Engineering, nursing, etc. have somewhat of a lockstep course sequence. It’s hard enough to squeeze in the U distribution requirements AND the electives necessary to finish those majors, let alone take some of the Honors seminars which work great for a Chem major or a History major….