Education Commons^™

Honors And Class, Bernice Braid

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Since the l980s a steady stream of scholarly works has examined stratification along class lines in American education. A recent work on this subject is Tearing Down the Gates, by Peter Sacks, which won the Frederic W. Ness Book Award in January 2009. It draws a detailed portrait of changes in demographics over the past thirty years or so. His time line allows him to pinpoint a growing polarization that shows a severely reduced college population of students from low-income families, displaced by an enormous increase in students from affluent families on our college campuses. As his subtitle indicates, …

Dedication: Mitch Pruitt

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The managing editor of a journal or monograph typically remains invisible to all but the journal editors. Since readers and authors rarely get to appreciate the work they do, we are especially pleased to honor the outstanding work of Mitch Pruitt and to express our appreciation on behalf of the National Collegiate Honors Council.

On Class And Class, Joan Digby

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

We have a long history in America of pretending that there is no class structure. If you ask students to identify their family by class, they all say “middle-class.” I, however, teach on the “Gold Coast” of Long Island where the Fricks, Vanderbilts, and Morgans owned big properties and yachts. There is no question that they never thought of themselves as middle-class. Indeed, Joan Harrison, my colleague in the Photography Department, just produced a wonderful photo-history of a city near campus—Images of America: Glen Cove (Arcadia Publishing, 2008)—showing a distribution of population from the robber barons to waves of Italian …

Editor’S Introduction, Ada Long

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The Forum that opens this issue of JNCHC is devoted to the topic “Social Class and Honors” and appears in the midst of economic and social turmoil unlike any since honors education started gaining momentum in the 1960s. As a prelude to the Forum, the time seems right to exercise some editorial prerogative and address potential implications that the financial meltdown might have for honors programs and colleges.

Editorial Matter

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Front Cover

EDITORIAL POLICY

DEADLINES

JOURNAL EDITORS

EDITORIAL BOARD

CONTENTS

CALL FOR PAPERS

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Class, Honors, And Eastern Kentucky: Why We Still Need To Try To Change The World, Linda Frost

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Norm Wiener’s piece “Honors Is Elitist, and What’s Wrong with That?” couldn’t have come at more opportune moment for me. Having recently accepted the directorship of a well-respected program founded by the legendary Dr. Bonnie Gray and seated in one of the poorest regions of the nation—Appalachia where, as Philip Cohen sang in “No Christmas in Kentucky,” “the trees don’t twinkle when you’re hungry”—I’ve been thinking a lot about class and honors lately. Eastern Kentucky is a place marked by tobacco barns, mountaintop-removal coal mining, infamous mining strikes (Harlan County U.S.A., Barbara Kopple’s film about one of those, …

List Of Journal Themes 2000-2009

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

 Liberal Learning In the New Century Vol. 1 No. 1 (2000) (the only issue not available digitally)

 Science in Honors Vol. 1 No. 2 (2000)

 Educational Transitions with Special Forum On Honors Education Vol. 2 No. 1 (2001)

 Honors and the Creative Arts Vol. 2 No. 2 (2001)

 Liberal Learning Vol. 3 No. 1 (2002)

 Technology in Honors Vol. 3 No. 2 (2002)

 Students and Teachers in Honors Vol. 4 No. 1 (2003)

 Multiperspectivism In Honors Education Vol. 4 No. 2 (2003)

 Research in Honors Vol. 5 No. 1 (2004)

 …

Dealing With Subjective And Objective Issues In Honors Education, Michael Giazzoni, Nathan Hilberg

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Professionals working in higher education who are concerned with social justice need to consider questions of objectivity and subjectivity. Even though some assessments are objective and some subjective, neither kind of assessment is guaranteed to separate out the effects of socioeconomic benefits from student ability. Honors programs and colleges should therefore concern themselves with the problem of awarding membership based on test criteria because the benefits inherent to honors programs could end up being given more often to those families with extra means and therefore the ability to provide opportunities like private tutoring and test preparation classes. Such actions can …

A Blue-Collar Honors Story, Annmarie Guzy

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In “Honors is Elitist, and What’s Wrong with That?” Norm Weiner contemplates definitions and perceptions of elitism, looking specifically at the intersection of academic elitism and socioeconomic elitism in honors education and arguing that honors programs at state schools or smaller private schools are successful at assisting students who are intellectually gifted but economically disadvantaged to “step up the social ladder” toward middleclass careers and values. My own personal and educational experiences exemplify this sentiment, and I sometimes feel as if I could be the poster child for socioeconomic ascendance through honors education—except for the fact that, despite the improvement …

Honors Needs Diversity More Than The Diverse Need Honors, William A. Ashton

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Awareness of and sensitivity to social class, economic class, ethnicity and gender have been important goals of the academy and of honors for the past few decades. During this time the academy, which has always been the domain primarily of the middle and upper class, has reached out to help those whom they call “the disadvantaged.” Typically, academics see such attempts at outreach as acts of generosity or social consciousness, a kind of noblesse oblige. The truth is that attracting students from different social classes as well as ethnicities and nationalities brings at least as much benefit to the college …

Journal Of The National Collegiate Honors Council, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring/Summer 2009

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

CONTENTS

Call for Papers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Submission Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Dedication to Mitch Pruitt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Editor’s Introduction (Ada Long) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

FORUM ON “SOCIAL CLASS AND HONORS” …

About The Authors

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

William A. Ashton

Bernice Braid

Craig T. Cobane

Rose Cole

Lisa DeFrank-Cole

Linda Frost

Keith Garbutt

Michael Giazzoni

Annmarie Guzy

Nathan Hilberg

Kyle McKay

Charlotte Pressler

Anne N. Rinn

Robert Spurrier

Norm Weiner

Predicting Retention In Honors Programs, Kyle Mckay

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

A number of challenges exist in providing the honors experience. Programs must compete for resources, coordinate departments, design dynamic curricula, and work toward changing goals. Among the many challenges, one of the hardest begins before students even enter the program. Honors admissions must select the students who will likely succeed in the program. After admissions, programs must then ensure that the program design encourages academic achievement and persistence in honors. To accomplish the goals and overcome the challenges of honors, a better understanding of the predictors of success is necessary. Using a logit regression model, my study will add evidence …

Does Broad-Based Merit Aid Affect Socioeconomic Diversity In Honors?, Lisa Defrank-Cole, Rose Cole, Keith Garbutt

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The honors college at West Virginia University (WVU) has seen an influx of high-achieving West Virginia students since 2001, when the PROMISE Scholarship was implemented. The PROMISE Scholarship is a merit-based financial aid award for West Virginia residents. If a student qualifies by achieving a certain GPA and ACT/SAT score, he or she receives a scholarship that covers the full cost of tuition at any state college or university in West Virginia. West Virginia University has benefited greatly from the PROMISE Scholarship. About half of all PROMISE Scholars attend West Virginia University (Higher Education Policy Commission, 2007), and many are …

The Two-Year College Honors Program And The Forbidden Topics Of Class And Cultural Capital, Charlotte Pressler

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

From my position as honors director at a two-year college in rural Florida, in the citrus and cow-hunter country south of I-4 and north of Okeechobee, Norm Weiner’s positing of honors education as a way to give students a chance to climb the class ladder seems persuasive. Honors education can, and does, help our students fulfill their middle-class aspirations. Yet much still remains to unpack in this middle-class-ness, especially in its connection to education. This territory is uncomfortable to Americans, for whom, as Weiner writes, “a basic . . . value is equality” and for whom the notion of social …

To The Charge Of “Honors Is Elitist,” On Advice Of Counsel We Plead “Guilty As Charged”, Robert Spurrier

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Norm Weiner’s introductory essay for this issue of the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council challenges us to face the charge of elitism that so frequently is lodged against honors programs and honors colleges (as well as against those of us who are involved in honors education as administrators, faculty, and students). On advice of wise counsel, my plea to the charge is “guilty as charged.”

Honors Is Elitist, And What’S Wrong With That?, Norm Weiner

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Like many other concepts in the sociological literature, social class is easier to discuss than to define. Nonetheless, define it we must in order to have some common ground for discussing it and for explaining it to our students. Aquick scan of basic textbooks, those defenders of sociology’s virtues, gives us a definition something like this: “A social class is a group of people [in sociology, it’s always safe to start this way] who share the same level of income and education and therefore share roughly the same norms, values, and lifestyle.” To be perfectly clear about this, sociologists aren’t …

Nchc Order Form

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

NATIONAL COLLEGIATE HONORS COUNCIL MONOGRAPHS & JOURNALS

Elitism Misunderstood: In Defense Of Equal Opportunity, Anne N. Rinn, Craig T. Cobane

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

At one time or another, we have all dealt with colleagues who expressed doubts about dedicating resources to honors students. They argue that gifted and high-achieving students do not need or deserve additional resources to pursue their educational goals; they will do just fine on their own. Critics of honors often comment that money spent on honors students, who will graduate anyway, should be invested in helping students with traditionally low retention rates; these latter students are the ones who need the resources. At some time in the discussion, such critics typically say that honors education is inherently “elitist” because …