Unlike faculty Fulbright Scholars who receive prestigious grants to do research abroad, Fulbright Student Scholars are still undergraduates or graduates who are completing work on master’s or doctorate degrees, and in some cases, bachelor’s degrees.
The public universities that lead in the number of Fulbright Student Scholars over the most recent three-year period are Michigan, Arizona State, UC Berkeley, Rutgers, North Carolina, Washington, Maryland, Pitt, and Illinois.
Earning any Fulbright award is a signal achievement. For this year’s report on public university leaders in student awards, we will also recognize leaders in the percentage of Fulbright applicants who were award the scholarships. (Note: thanks to the Chronicle of Higher Education for the publishing the number of applicants along with the number of awards.)
Below, please see the top 20 public universities for Fulbright student honors in 2012. Once again, Michigan led all universities, public or private, in the total number of Fulbright Student Scholars. We also want to congratulate Oklahoma State, Arizona State, South Carolina, and Ohio University for the high percentage of their student applicants who actually won the award. (Arizona State and South Carolina are also among the top 20 in total awards among public universities. Any school with 11 or more awards is also in the top 30 nationally, among both public and private national universities.)
The average success rate for the top 40 national research universities, public and private, was 25 percent. Below we will list the percentages for all schools who exceeded the average percentage. The average number of awards earned by students from the 50 major public universities we follow most closely was just over 8.
Fulbright students from U.S. universities may study any subject abroad, except for clinical medicine. Below are the figures for 2012:
Recently, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, publisher of the prestigious journal Science, released the names of just over 700 U.S. faculty members who had been named fellows of the AAAS. Below is a partial breakdown, showing the public institutions with at least five fellows for the current year.
In addition, we will have a separate list showing the number of National Academy of Sciences (NAS) members for each university. Membership in the NAS is extremely selective.
Some of the numbers may be a surprise, but what is no surprise is the prominence of University of California schools, especially on the NAS list.
New Fellows AAAS (note: our list does not include fellows from medical schools affiliated with universities)
Michigan–19(led all institutions, public and private)
Ohio State–18 (second among all institutions)
Univ of S. Florida–14
UC Davis–13
UC Irvine–13
Maryland–11
UC San Diego–11
Washington–11
Indiana–10
Purdue–9
North Carolina–8
Stony Brook–8
UC Santa Barbara–8
Washington State–8
Georgia Tech–7
Minnesota–7
Tennessee–7
UCLA–7
UT Austin–7
Illinois–6
Penn State–6
Colorado State–5
Florida–5
Georgia–5
Missouri–5
Rutgers–5
Univ of Cent. Florida–5
The next list shows public institutions that have at least ten faculty members in the National Academy of Sciences:
UC Berkeley–129 (third highest in the nation, public or private, following Harvard and Stanford)
As an architect and president of Clemson University, James F. Barker is perhaps the best person in America to speak to the value of the college campus as a place where young men and women can learn, grow, and be transformed within an atmosphere that is not only intellectually stimulating but also physically beautiful and inspiring.
Barker was one of several college presidents who contributed essays to a publication entitled Responding to the Commodification of Higher Education. The title of Barker’s essay is “The Endangered Campus: Defining and Defending the Value of Place-Based Higher Education.”
Online delivery is “no substitute for the experience of ‘going away to college,'” he writes. “We must bring that experience into the 21st century and make it meaningful for today’s students. The best education is not transactional but transformational. It’s not: ‘You give me X amount of money and I give you a credential and a degree.’ Rather it is: ‘You give us four years, and you get a life-changing experience.’
Barker might have been speaking as well of the value of Clemson’s Calhoun Honors College, one of the most successful in the nation.
Barker recognizes the utility of digital learning methods, noting that for years Clemson has used a blended model in almost all math courses and in introductory chemistry. Students work in small groups while seated at round “technologically-enabled tables,” where they listen to short lectures and then complete exercises “to reinforce concepts and track progress.” Using this model, students have had higher success and graduation rates.
Yet the success of this blended model in some kinds of instruction does not replace what Barker calls the “Idea of the Campus,” rooted in five concepts:
• Each campus is a distinct place. Each of us experiences it in a very personal way.
• The campus is a community – an intentional community. We are not born there. We choose to study or work there. It is a place of diversity and unity.
• The campus is stimulating and energetic. It bustles with ideas, creativity, and innovation.
• The campus is a work of art – for many of us, the first designed, beautiful, and cohesive landscape we experience.
• The campus is a place of pilgrimage – a place we return to, to renew a sense of belonging to the community we experienced in our youth.
But campus communities have another powerful value. “Besides the cultural and historic value of our campuses, they also have economic value” Barker writes. “In a recent New York Times column, Thomas Friedman wrote that ‘the best entrepreneurial ecosystems
in the future will be cities and towns that combine a university, an educated populace, a dynamic business community and the fastest broadband connections. These will be the job factories of the future.'”
But the most important value of the physical campus is the impetus it gives to instruction. “A beautiful, stimulating campus environment attracts the best students, faculty, and staff. It encourages personal reflection and group learning. Simply being together in a physical place, as a community of teachers and learners, has tremendous educational advantages,” the president-architect writes.
The real concerns for Barker and many other higher education leaders is not whether online instruction will have a significant role on campus but how that role should be defined in a way that does not diminish the overriding place of the campus as the principal seat of learning.
Most would agree with Barker that “he campus has always been the place where students begin separating from their families and gain independence. It’s a place where the deepest kinds of discovery and learning can and should happen. It’s a place where brains are fed, minds are opened, and lifelong connections and communities are formed. It’s a place that attracts creative, innovative people and creates the right ecosystem for community and economic development.”
We now have a complete list of the 2013 winners of the Marshall Scholarships, which fund two years of graduate study at any university in the United Kingdom.
Up to 40 Marshall Scholarships are awarded each year to students at U.S. universities, but this year only 34 scholars were selected. Below are the 34 students and the 31 universities they represent:
Abilene Christian University–Brittany Partridge, a political science major and founder of the Red Thread Movement, which raises awareness of modern-day slavery and works to save Nepalese girls from the sex trafficking, will study at University College, London. The Red Thread Movement has supporters at about 75 campuses across the nation. She also won a Truman Scholarship this year.
Air Force Academy–Ian Gibson, also a Truman Scholar, will study political science at the London School of Economics.
Boston College–Aditya Ashok was a winner of the Truman Scholarship in 2011; he majored in history and biology and will study global health at the University of Glasgow.
Brandeis–Elizabeth Stoker, a graduate in theology and Christian ethics, will study philosophy at Oxford.
Brown–Nick Werle, a 2010 graduate in physics and modern philosophy, will work on master’s degrees at University College, London, and the London School of Economics.
Colorado State–Christopher Counts, a student in the honors program with majors in biomedical sciences and anthropology, will study at University College, London. He is the founder of Hygiene for Humanity.
Columbia–Dylan Liu, an engineering major, will study theoretical physics at Oxford.
UConn–Ethan Butler, a chemical engineering graduate and previous winner of a Udall award, will study at Imperial College, London.
CUNY John Jay College for Criminal Justice–Nicolas Montano, a senior in CUNY’s Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies Program at John Jay College, will pursue two master’s degrees–one in research in the social sciences at the University Liverpool and the other in criminal justice policy at the London School of Economics.
Duke–Kenneth Hoehn, a biology major with minors in computational biology and bioinformatics, will study at Oxford.
Georgetown (2)–Shea Houlihan, an international politics major, will study social research methods and international migration at the University of Sussex. Benjamin Buchanan graduated in 2011 with a degree in government and minors in Arabic and English, will pursue either a doctorate in war studies from King’s College, London, or a doctorate in information communication and the social sciences at Oxford.
George Washington–Stephanie Figgins, who graduated in 2011 with a degree in economics and international affairs, will study post-colonial culture and global politics at the University of London; she has been a journalist with the Voice of America in Cairo.
Georgia Tech–Jacob Tzegaebe, pursuing a five-year BS/MS degree in civil engineering, will work on a doctorate in the same field at University College, London. He has also earned an NSF grant and was a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship.
Harvard (2)–Aditya Balasubramanium will study political science at the London School of Economics, and Alex Palmer will study at King’s College, London.
Illinois–Jonathan Naber, a 2011 graduate in materials science and engineering, designed prosthetic prototypes and established a non-profit organization to provide low-cost prosthetic devices to amputees in the developing world. Jonathan will pursue a degree at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He is now working in Guatemala on a project to make the devices out of native materials.
Michigan–Spencer Smith graduated in 2011 with degrees in economics and math and will study economics at Oxford.
Montana State–Bryan Vadheim, a member of the University Honors Program, is MSU’s first Marshall Scholar. He will study at the London School of Economics and King’s College, London. His interests are water science and governance. Montana State also produced a Rhodes Scholar this year: Joe Thiel, who will study engineering at Oxford.
Naval Academy (2)–Katelyn Davidson, and English major, will work on an M.A. in gender and equality at Queen’s University in Belfast and an M.A. in international peace and security at Kings College, London. Ronald Allen, an economics major, will study public policy at Kings College, London. The Naval Academy also had two Rhodes Scholars this year.
Northwestern–Jennifer Mills, a triple major in earth and planetary science, integrated sciences, and chemistry, also has a minor in physics. She is part of the university’s highly-selective integrated sciences program. Already the author of two scientific articles, she will study and integrated science, she will study climate science at Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh.
NYU–Jessica Mason, a social work graduate, will study global policy at the London School of Economics and work on an MSc. at Oxford.
Ohio University–Keith Hawkins, already a Goldwater Scholar, studied astrophysics, math, and African studies in the university’s Honors Tutorial College. He is doing research now at the University of Hawaii and previously did research at Caltech. He will continue his studies at Cambridge.
Ohio State–Alexander Chaitoff, a Truman Scholarship winner in 2012, will complete an MPH at the University of Sheffield.
Oklahoma–Jerod Coker, a senior economics major, will pursue a master’s degree in economics and philosophy at the London School of Economics, after which he plans to obtain a JD/MBA from Harvard. OU student Mubeen Shakir, a biochemistry major, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship this year.
Pitt–Paras Minhas, a microbiology major and student in the honors college, will work on a Ph.D. at University College, London.
Princeton–Jake Nebel, a philosophy student, will work on an M.A. at Oxford.
Rice–Rahul Rekhi, a bioengineering major, will study biology and bioinformatics at Oxford. He has also won both Truman and Goldwater awards.
USC–Alexander Fullman, a political science major, will continue his studies in that field at Oxford.
UT Austin–William Berdanier, a Dean’s Scholar honors student in physics and math, has also won a Goldwater Scholarship. His undergraduate research has focused in part on developing fusion energy. He will study at Cambridge.
Virginia–Hillary Hurd was a Jefferson Scholar at UVA and majored in Russian and East European Studies. She will concentrate on international studies at Cambridge and at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Washington U St. Louis–Alexander Baron, also a Luce Scholar, has majors in philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and political science. He will pursue graduate studies at Oxford.
Wesleyan–Zully Adler, a history grad in 2011, will study art history and print culture at Oxford.
It is a dream of many honors deans and directors that their offices might one day be able to coordinate honors curriculum, undergraduate research, internships, and study-abroad under one roof.
That day has already arrived for the Honors College at East Tennessee State University, located in Johnson City, right on the border between Tennessee and Virginia.
Although the bedrock University Honors Scholars program was established in 1993, the advent of the Honors College in 2005 brought with it two more honors options along with the consolidation of all the above functions within the college. Dean Rebecca Ann Pyles reports that graduation rates are high among the more than 400 students enrolled in all honors options–86–88 percent of students graduate in honors.
The University Honors Scholars program enrolls only about 22 students a year. Minimum entrancement requirements include an SAT of 1290 and GPA of 3.5. The UHS program extends across all four years and, like the other two options at the college, requires the completion of an honors thesis.
UHS students complete four year-long seminars, two in the freshmen year and two more as sophomores. The freshman seminars focus on English and philosophy. Students consider alternatives to their own views, often from global perspectives, and then reflect on how their own perspectives might be seen by others.
In the sophomore year, much of the emphasis is on the interrelationships of the sciences and the broader culture. Students not only learn about the most significant scientific concepts but also the ethical responsibilities that accompany many scientific advances.
Sophomores also take a turn toward the creative side. Students study and participate in studio and performing arts, learning the importance of aesthetics to all elements of human culture.
Juniors participate in the unique Honors Appalachian course, where they study the history, arts, economics, and politics of the region.
Senior honors work focuses on research and the completion of the honors thesis.
The Midway Scholars option enrolls transfer students with an associate’s degree or at least 30 hours of credit, and with a minimum GPA of 3.5. Midway Scholars take three honors or honors option courses and must complete a research course and write a thesis.
The Honors in Discipline (HID) option also requires honors or honors option coursework along with a thesis in the major, or “discipline,” of the student. Currently, seventeen departments are involved in the HID program.
All honors students can take advantage of Washington internships coordinated by the honors office, and can participate in international study, also through the honors college.
Honors students at ETSU also have the option of living on the sixth floor of Governors Hall, new in 2007. The hall includes space for more than 500 students who share double rooms with private baths.
The four pubic university undergraduate business programs that appear near the top of many rankings are those at the universities of Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina Chapel Hill, and UT Austin.
All four are highly selective, especially the Ross School of Business at Michigan and the Business Honors Program (BHP) at the McCombs School of Business at UT Austin. These two programs differ from the other two in allowing freshmen to participate, though the freshmen “preferred” admits at Michigan only take one core business class the first year.
All applicants for preferred admission at Michigan “must first receive an offer of summer or fall admission to U-M’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA); the College of Engineering; the School of Kinesiology (Sport Management only); the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance; or the School of Art & Design” before being considered for the Ross School of Business.
The average SAT/ACT for preferred admits is 1494/34, and the high school gpa average is 3.91. The acceptance rate for 2011-2012 was 16.25 percent; in the most recent class, a total of 89 students enrolled as preferred admits. The average UM gpa for regular admits (who must have one or more years of college) is 3.65, and the acceptance rate is 39.9 percent. About 440 regular admits are enrolled.
Even though many preferred admits may also earn admission to the excellent LSA Honors Program at UM, they should know that combining LSA honors and the Ross regimen of business courses can be daunting.
The McIntire School of Commerce at UVA requires an even larger number of hours–at least 54–before a student can become part of the school, giving UVA business students the most expansive required background in liberal arts of any of the schools discussed in this post. Students in the prestigious Echols Scholars (honors) program are not exempt from this requirement.
The mean GPA of students admitted to McIntire after at least 54 hours of course work at UVA is 3.65. The average SAT for freshmen entrants at UVA is about 1395. However, many students transfer into McIntire from Virginia community colleges or other colleges, and the average SATs for these students is between 1190 and 1280, although the GPA for transfers must be at least 3.8.
Admission to UNC Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School requires making it through a “rigorous and selective” process that includes a year of previous study. The average SAT is 1346, with an average college GPA of 3.56. In a recent year, 330 students were admitted, while 236 were denied.
A small number of freshmen can qualify for the Assured Admission Program (AAP), which appears to be similar to the preferred admission program at Michigan. The average SATs and high school GPAs for AAP are probably similar to those at Michigan and at the Business Honors Program at UT Austin. Students can be in Honors Carolina and qualify for AAP as well.
The BHP at UT Austin differs from all three of the other programs discussed here in that it requires full freshman participation. It is also highly selective, with the average SAT being 1480 in 2012, and the average high school class rank being in the top 2.1 percent. In 2012, a total of 235 freshmen enrolled in the BHP, and the acceptance rate was 22.2 percent.
As in the case of the LSA Honors Program at Michigan, BHP students can also be in UT Austin’s highly-ranked Plan II Liberal Arts Honors Program, but only 11 out of 145 recent Plan II graduates also completed the BHP at the same time.
Rhodes chooses scholars in November preceding the year of award. For example, 2013 scholars, below, were named in 2012.
The latest list of Rhodes Scholars (awarded in November 2012 for the year 2013) includes seven recipients from Yale, six from Harvard, two from Cornell, and one from Brown, giving the Ivy League half of the 32 awards for 2013.
The most prestigious academic award in the world, Rhodes Scholarships fund two or three years of study at Oxford; at total of 838 students applied this year. The approximate yearly value of a Rhodes Scholarship is $50,000.
The service academies at Annapolis and West Point had two winners each. Stanford also had two.
State universities with winners in 2013 are Georgia, Georgia Tech, Montana State, North Carolina Chapel Hill, Oklahoma, UC Berkeley, and Virginia. Virginia and North Carolina are the leaders among all state universities in the number of Rhodes Scholars earned by their graduates.
Special congratulations to University of Georgia honors graduate Juliet Elizabeth Allen, and kudos to the great public institutions in the Southeast.
Other state university leaders in total Rhodes Scholarships are Washington, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, UT Austin, Kansas, Mississippi, Arizona, Georgia, and Nebraska.
Planning a national conference in Boston, the birthplace of American Independence, allowed the National Collegiate Honors Council to go with their instincts and tie many conference presentations to the individual and independent character of honors programs–and honors students.
One such student is Riley Cook from the University of Iowa Honors Program, who is a candidate for the two-year term as student representative on the national board of the NCHC. It is fitting that the NCHC would include students on its board, and the presence of 600 honors students at the annual conference attests to the interest and commitment to honors students.
We ran into Riley at the conference and realized that his outlook corresponded closely with the overall theme of the meeting: challenging structures in higher education. Other articles about the conference have addressed the commitment of the honors community to insist that a high-level college education must go far beyond the acquisition of specialized skills to include an intellectual focus on “the things that matter” the most in life: a deeper understanding of ourselves and our relation to other human beings and institutions.
Or, to use Riley Cook’s own words, honors “should not just be something to put on a resume; it should be a medium through which students explore their passions on a personal level with faculty and fellow students to their full extent. My main concern is what honors can do intrinsically for students to enrich their academics rather than just be a series of requirements to fulfill.”
Now if you look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, you will see the following: “Intrinsic value has traditionally been thought to lie at the heart of ethics. Philosophers use a number of terms to refer to such value. The intrinsic value of something is said to be the value that that thing has ‘in itself,’ or ‘for its own sake,’ or ‘as such,’ or ‘in its own right.'”
Intrinsic values are what we discover; instrumental knowledge is what we receive. Honors education is about discovery.
Riley expressed concern to us that many institutions lack the commitment to honors education that would allow faculty to teach the smaller discussion courses that promote this kind of discovery. The reason: faculty “productivity”is a metric used by administrators–and legislators–to assess how efficient departments are, productivity typically reflects only the quantity of students taught, and not the content or individual character of courses.
“Unfortunately,” Riley said, “the quantity of students in the classroom is considered more financially worthwhile than investing in the quality of personalized honors discussion.”
Riley sees this as shortsighted. “I spoke with a business student in honors at [another] university who informed me that an honors program did not always exist there. The lack of honors directly affected enrollment, significantly enough to necessitate the establishment of such a program.” In other words, honors attracts more students, and these students, in turn, raise the overall quality and perception of the university.
Riley also sees the importance of honors programs in generating support from honors alumni who can become mentors and, in some cases, donors to the institution.
“Students aren’t the only ones who benefit from honors opportunities,” he said. “By offering research opportunities, professors are able to work with valuable research assistants. Even collaborating on a student’s independent research project could influence their research or at least deepen their knowledge of a certain topic in their field. In a university setting, professors are learners, too, and the students they collaborate with may become valuable partners in their field in the years to come.”
After hearing what Riley has had to say, it should be no surprise that honors faculty frequently find themselves in the role of partners or facilitators, and less as the intellectual masters who deliver wisdom from on high. They, too, engage in the process of discovery.
The theme of the 2012 conference of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) being held in Boston is “challenging structures” in higher education, and at the center of that challenge is the honors focus on the “ecology” of undergraduate instruction: the critical and sometimes difficult balance among faculty, students, and the pursuit of knowledge that brings them together.
In a session devoted to honors instruction, a thoughtful and expressive panel of honors professionals emphasized that learning at the highest level requires challenging themselves and their students to see the acquisition of knowledge as a dynamic, adventurous process that goes far beyond the ingestion of basic facts.
The goal, according to Michael Doran, director of the honors program at the University of South Alabama, is to work with students so that they can gain confidence, accept risks, and become passionate about “inquiry and the creation of new knowledge…students rise to higher expectations, and that message is transferred to other students on campus.”
The words “creativity” and “reflection” and “inquiry” were prominent in the discussion. John Zubizarreta of Columbia College in South Carolina noted that the “importance of reflection…is important for all students, but for honors students it’s indispensable.”
One reason: honors portfolios, when they are in fact used in honors programs, collect the most important elements of a student’s experience–major papers, significant projects, notes, lists of books and their significance–all of which connect the student to accomplishments and aspirations, and clarify goals.
At Texas A&M, according to Jon Kolinek, associate director of the honors program, students in living/learning communities meet to discuss what they have learned, especially in first-year courses and experiences, and then reflect on how the first year has reinforced their initial goals or caused them to consider different options.
The use of portfolios, discussions, and focused reflection is not unique to students. At Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University, a formal mentoring program involving current honors faculty with prospective honors instructors has been in place for several years.
According to Jacquie Scott, director of the Barrett Faculty Mentoring Program for Teaching Excellence and an honors faculty fellow at Barrett, the program requires two years of classroom visits and feedback, all geared toward making Barrett faculty as focused as they can be on effective, high-level student instruction. The program has also increased overall faculty cooperation and reduced territorial conflicts among disciplines. This is yet another way that honors education can be a positive influence for the university as a whole.
One part of the honors “ecology” that is requiring more attention is the recognition that the traditional honors predilection toward confident, extroverted young scholars who can comfortably participate in what are typically small honors seminars can mean that quieter, introverted students of great ability might be overlooked or misunderstood if they do participate in honors. An audience member from the University of Southern Maine pointed out that faculty need to be aware of such students and not equate their relative reticence with a lack of ability or the passion for learning
Jon Kotinek of Texas A&M sees honors instruction is a process of “layering” honors experiences in the most effective manner. This layering, the ecology of honors instruction, means that the watchwords of creativity, inquiry, reflection, and even risk should inform the pedagogy of faculty and the attitudes of students, to the end that the knowledge they all seek is not merely transmitted but also transformed by their exciting work.
The Honors College at the University of Maine-Orono is highly-respected among honors professionals, and one reason is that the college curriculum is a well-balanced blend of a liberal arts core curriculum augmented by a carefully coordinated department focus in the junior and senior years.
The core is typically made up of four courses:
“The four courses constituting Civilizations: Past, Present, and Future follow a chronological trajectory from earliest recorded times through the present, examining philosophy, history, literature, the arts, and natural, physical, and social sciences. In particular, by incorporating primary sources, small group discussions, and multiple perspectives, these courses explore the way in which civilizations and cultures have been developed and have interacted with others.”
In the third year, students take honors tutorials and seminars, most of which satisfy the university’s general education requirements. Through careful reading, honors students can select “from among eight texts nominated by the University community, the ‘Honors Read’ for incoming students in the Honors College a year hence.”
Honors students in a tutorial also select a visiting scholar in ethics for the succeeding year, a process that requires students to analyze writings and other “evidence presented about the candidates, deliberate using those criteria, and correspond and negotiate with viable candidates to determine availability and suitability.” This exercise combines extensive research with a real-world decision-making problem.
In the senior year, honors students must take an honors directed study course, which prepares them for their senior honors thesis. The directed study course and thesis count for three credit hours each. Honors graduation requires at least 27 credit hours in honors courses, and AP credits are not applied to honors credit.
The university as a whole is increasing its focus on prestigious scholarship competition. In recent years, Maine students have won four Goldwater scholarships in the last six years along with four Udall awards, all of which are earned by undergraduates. Also in the last two years Maine students have won four National Science Foundation Graduate Research Grants. In 2012, a Maine student was awarded the school’s fourth Truman Scholarship.
The best academic departments at Maine are earth sciences, social work, clinical psychology, education, and history.
The college does not publish average admission statistics, but we estimate the the minimum SAT score for the honors college is around 1200 to 1250, with a high school graduate place in the top 10-12 percent. Again, this is only an estimate based on some comparable programs.
Honors students benefit from program advisors who are former honors students at Maine, and also have the support of honors preceptors/instructors in many academic departments. About 120 freshmen honors students out of approximately 750 on campus choose to live in honors housing in Colvin and Balentine Halls.
Colvin remodeling was finished in 2008, and the facility also houses the Thomson Honors Center, home of the college. Colvin is the smallest residence hall on campus, home to 36 students in 8 quads, one triple, plus the RA’s quarters. “The floors are hardwood, the bathrooms are brand new, and Colvin is the only residence hall with wireless throughout.”
“Balentine Hall, arguably one of the most beautiful buildings on campus, was first occupied in 1914….Balentine Hall was an all-women’s residence hall until the fall of 2003; today it is part of Honor’s College housing, with room for 78 students in the residential areas.”
It may still be the case that a few honors students also live in Penobscot Hall. All honors residence halls have both freshmen and upperclassmen.
