Honors College Council

Voting members present: Noah Barnett, Eliza Barstow, Michael Burand, Emma DeFreeuw, Jessica Fujinaga, Adam Gross, Kate McIntosh, Sandy Neubaum, Jax Richards
Voting members absent: Hilary Boudet, Sam Logan, Bo Sun
Ex-Officio Members present: Toni Doolen – Honors College
Guests present: Susan Rodgers, Sahana Shaw

Assessment

• While all college-level units need to undergo assessment, the folks organizing this forgot to include the Honors College (HC) as a unit. “Honors” data is always tricky to pull (as all honors students are also students in other colleges). This means that assessment is on hold for the time being.

Strategic Financial Plan for the Honors College

• To begin, there was significant hiring in the last year.
• The Honors College has pursued strategy-driven investments. Since 2019, the College has taken money from the HC budget and put it into differential tuition scholarships. This is possible because OSU allows the use of E & G funds for scholarships; 10% of differential tuition is also held back centrally and used for general OSU scholarships. The HC is working to increase its scholarship endowment funds through private philanthropy. Toni is working on this, and it’s a long-term effort. About 30% of HC students have significant financial need, and yet only about 35% of our high-need students apply for scholarships which help pay differential tuition. Starting next year, then, about 2/3 of the money the HC puts towards DT scholarships will go automatically to students with need even if they don’t apply. The remaining 1/3 will be allocated to students applying for Differential Tuition (DT) scholarships.
• This year, the HC once again decided NOT to raise differential tuition; the College has had the same differential tuition since 2017. It has been possible to avoid raising tuition because the HC is growing and also because we’ve been efficient with filling courses and scaling resources.
• Differential tuition is one of our largest sources of revenue; we also get a “completion bonus” when an HC student graduates.
• In the last couple of years, there’s been a drop off in applications for experiential learning scholarships. This is not a huge surprise given that we lived through a pandemic in the last couple of years. This fall, we are likely to hit an enrollment of 1800, and that means we’ll be 6% of the OSU undergraduate body. (Side note: We have trouble getting to 6% of students in Agriculture Sciences (CAS), College of Liberal Arts (CLA), Public Health and Human Sciences (CPHHS), and Business (COB).)
• Our biggest expense is personnel costs (both unclassified and unclassified); our second biggest is allocating money to other colleges to pay for the courses faculty teach for the HC.
• The HC wants to hire someone who will support our OSU Cascade students; this will be a half-time position.

Ecampus Updates

• We have nine confirmed students who applied and were accepted to pursue an honors degree via Ecampus! This is based on the winter application cycle; Toni was thinking of adding ten students a year, so it looks like demand might be even higher than anticipated.
• Leanna Dillon will be our Ecampus coordinator and will advise Ecampus students and create cocurricular programming for Ecampus students.

Eclectic Information

• The HC will be offering a wider range of options for students who showcase their thesis work. While many students will continue to do posters, other options now include doing lightning talks or posting content about their thesis on the HC’s Symposium site. In the past, only students graduating in the spring had to do a poster, but now all HC graduates will need to find a way to communicate the basic ideas of their thesis to a broader audience (via poster, lightning talk, or posting to the HC Symposium site). This year, the poster reception will be in LINC on May 19 from 1-3.
• Both HC course evaluations and thesis completion surveys are now completely online.
• We collected data from alumni to get insight into what they’re doing and how the thesis process helped them moving forward. The HC wants to be able to show the value of the degree. Many alumni focused on the benefits of the skills gained through the thesis process.
• We’ve had our highest ever involvement (and success) with Fulbright process; LeAnn Adam wants to connect with faculty for recommendations of students who might be solid candidates for Fulbright awards.
• We have had record applications for Honors; probably will have about 700-800 incoming students!