Abstract
Honors colleges housed in public universities began only in the last half century, but have become nearly ubiquitous over the last 20 years. This paper, using recent data from the oldest stand-alone honors college in the country, is the first to study how the application and enrollment decisions of honors college students differ from the general population of students considering a large public university. Overall, the empirical results suggest that honors college applicants and enrollees are drawn from the right-tail of its host institution’s ability distribution, independent of residency status. Nonetheless, honors-college applicants are still more likely to enroll in selective and liberal arts institutions than the general pool of admits to a large public university, which is only partially offset by the effect of honors-college admission. It follows that honors colleges enroll academically stronger, but not the strongest, admits to a large public university.
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Notes
Long (2002) finds that nearly all honors colleges are located in institutions classified as “Highly Competitive”, “Very Competitive”, or “Competitive” and that, similar to CHC, most have a separate, selective admissions process, offer special living arrangements (i.e., separate dorm or wing of a dorm), have special forms of financial aid, and make up approximately 5% of the student population.
In July 1975, the college was named Robert D. Clark Honors College to honor the vision and dedication of a UO speech professor who led the founding of the Honors College.
The admittance rate for the general population of UO applicants is 90% with an enrollment rate of 34%.
The resource fee in 2009 was a $1000 per term in the first year and slightly lower amount for each term after the first year until graduation.
The student scoring sheet data from the CHC include all applicants from 2009 and all enrollees during the three academic years. Unfortunately, two boxes of alphabetically listed applicant files were inadvertently discarded by the CHC. Thus, data for 2007 include only applicants who were denied by the CHC and whose last names begin with L to Z; whereas the 2008 data include only applicants who declined the admission offer and whose last name initials A to M. We demonstrate subsequently in Table 3 columns 1 and 2 that the alphabetically generated missing data are not systematic in nature. In fact the estimates that rely exclusively on the 2009 data are qualitatively equivalent to those that include the full three years. Thus, we use all three years of data that increase the statistical power of our estimates and generally focus on the sign and not the magnitude of the coefficients. These data limitations only apply to the applicant analysis in Table 3 that rely on the student scoring sheets in addition to other UO data sources that do not have missing data.
The total admission score possible was 30 in 2007 and became 28 in 2008 and 2009.
The inclusion of fix effects in the logit model can significantly reduce the sample size because there are 0.6% of resident students and 8% of non-resident students that are the only applicant from a particular high school. To test the sensitivity of the results to the distributional assumption of the dependent variable (i.e., OLS versus logit) and the presence of fixed effects, OLS and logit models are estimated without fixed effects and compared to the presented OLS specification with fixed effects. In general, the qualitative conclusions are robust across these three alternative specifications for the significant explanatory variables.
Descriptive statistics (available upon request) show that, whereas the admissions rate into the UO is approximately 90%, only 62 (50)% of in-state (out-of-state) CHC applicants are admitted to the honors college even with their stronger academic background. On the other hand, approximately 38 (16)% of CHC applicants enroll, which is lower than that of the UO that is 54 (21)% for in-state (out-of-state) students.
Separate estimates of the admissions model by residency status yield very similar findings as those for the full population. However, the coefficients on the SAT scores and high-school GPA are not significant for out-of-state students. This suggests that the CHC follows their formal admissions guideline more carefully for non-resident students than for their in-state counterparts.
Similar to these findings, enrollment estimates in Curs and Singell (2002) that use all UO applicants finds that the institution tends to lose the best students to competing institutions.
For UO applicants who do not apply to the CHC, approximately 8 and 7% respectively enroll in selective and top-100 liberal arts institutions as defined by the 2009 U.S. and World Report, and 15 and 7% respectively enroll in 4-year publics in the West and other 4-year publics. Descriptive statistics (not presented) show UO admits who choose to enroll in selective or top-100 liberal arts institutions have higher average SAT scores and high school GPA than those who choose to enroll UO and other 4-year public institutions.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Dean David Frank and Paula Braswell of the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon for providing the data that were essential to our research. We are responsible for any remaining errors and omissions.
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Singell, L.D., Tang, HH. The Pursuit of Excellence: An Analysis of the Honors College Application and Enrollment Decision for a Large Public University. Res High Educ 53, 717–737 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-012-9255-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-012-9255-6