The Effect of Honors College Participation on Student Outcomes

Honors education refers to programs for high achieving students at U.S. post-secondary institutions. These programs provide high achieving students benefits such as the ability to enroll in exclusive courses with small class sizes, to live in special dorms, and to enroll in classes earlier then non-honors students. These changes to a student’s college experience may change their academic outcomes in ways that concern students and policymakers. Results in most prior research on the effect of honors program participation on academic outcomes may be biased by unobserved differences between students in and not in an honors program. This paper addresses these unobserved differences by studying an honors college that uses GPA admissions cutoffs. The Michigan State University Honors College considers for admission all students in the top 10% of the freshmen fall semester GPA distribution of each non-honors college. I use a regression discontinuity research design to compare outcomes of students above and below the cutoffs, and attribute differences in outcomes to differences in honors college participation. I find that participation in the honors college may reduce the time for students to get their first degree and increase the probability that first-generation college students will graduate from MSU