By Tristan Weisenbach
Editor-in-Chief
The College’s Honors and Scholars Program recently announced its fall 2025 course offerings, giving students a list of what classes they are eligible to enroll in to fulfill one of the five honors courses needed to complete the program requirements.
Since my first semester back in fall 2021, I was never impressed with the courses that the honors program offered. I always found most of them to be related to topics that I was not interested in.
It was also consistently a struggle for me to enroll in honors courses because of how few were actually offered.
I am particularly glad that I am now a senior and have already finished my honors requirements after looking at the honors course offerings for the upcoming fall.
Only nine honors course sections are being offered, two of which are for the same class. Most of these classes cover the same general topics that are offered every semester, such as philosophy, music, literature and political science.
The Honors Program needs to have more variation in the topics that it offers courses in. Not only will this allow students from a wider array of majors to enroll in classes that are more tailored to their interests, but it could also help expose honors students to more areas of study, revealing potential new interests.
Nine classes is also not enough to completely cater to the needs of all students in the program. Some courses in the honors list are not fully dedicated to honors students, but are regular classes with only a handful of seats reserved for Honors students.
Enrolling in five honors courses over four years may seem achievable, but in reality is quite difficult. First-year students often struggle to enroll in their first choice classes due to having the latest enrollment appointments. This, paired with course scheduling issues that have plagued students of all years at the College in recent semesters, makes it increasingly difficult to enroll in honors courses.
The honors program does allow for students to substitute two honors courses for an Honors-by-Contract. To do so, students can submit a proposal to have a non-honors course count for honors credit by adding on an additional project to their coursework for the semester.
While this is a good substitution for students who may want to take this route to fulfill the requirement, students should not be forced, in essence, to result to Honors-by-Contract because they are unable to enroll in enough honors classes.
The Honors and Scholars Program needs to take into consideration the vast interests that honors students across all seven undergraduate academic schools have, and offer a wider array of courses. The program also needs to ensure that it is offering enough honors classes so that students can complete the course requirements before graduating.
