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Honors Advocacy Toolkit
Resources

Honors Advocacy Toolkit

One goal of NCHC, as an organization that offers guidelines and support to institutions engaged in collegiate honors education, is to build awareness of the value that programs and colleges bring to their institutions. Your NCHC membership gives you access to a range of tools for professional and program or college development, including the following resources for advocacy on behalf of honors education.

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Understanding and Defining the Value of Honors Education

This part of the toolkit offers ideas, shared language, and templates for explaining the value of honors work to outsiders or stakeholders with limited understanding—or a misperception—of that work.

Honors education ignites passion for lifelong learning and encourages student creativity, collaboration, and leadership in the classroom and beyond. It is characterized by in-class and extracurricular activities that are measurably broader, deeper, or more complex than comparable learning experiences typically found at institutions of higher education. Honors curriculum serves as a laboratory for inventive and experiential education that can be implemented in the traditional classroom. Honors experiences include a distinctive learner-directed environment and philosophy, provide opportunities that are appropriately tailored to fit the institution's culture and mission, and frequently occur within a close community of students and faculty.

Like its students, every honors program is unique in its offerings and methodology. One of the ways NCHC supports its members is through the development of shared practices and principles that help both honors students and faculty thrive in their programs.

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There are eight areas in which honors programs add value to their institution:

  1. Recruitment
  2. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
  3. Student Success
  4. Engagement in High Impact Practices
  5. Honors as a Laboratory for the Institution
  6. Fundraising
  7. Faculty Success
  8. Modeling Behavior for All Students

Before advocating for the value of honors education on your campus, consider the perspectives of your audience and stakeholders. Articulating what, specifically, each stakeholder group values, and how honors education supports and advances those values will make your advocacy work most effective. Messages will vary according to audience and institution, but all should share the philosophy and understanding described in the documents linked above. Below is a list of typical stakeholders for honors programs/colleges.

  • Students (honors and non-honors)
  • Faculty (teachers, mentors, advisors)
  • Alumni and donors (honors and non-honors)
  • Staff and campus groups
  • Institutional government liasons (e.g., state and federal lobbyists)
  • Institutional marketing staff
  • Institutional development officers
  • Institutional administrators
  • Community members

NCHC offers a range of publications and research that articulates the professional and financial impact of honors education on various stakeholders, as defined above. Examples include the following:

View NCHC Publications
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Using Data to Make the Case for Honors

You can include the following data when it is applicable, useful, and available – every institution is different. (NOTE: Possible sources for this information are inside the accordion menus. This list might also help honors programs and colleges to update their data collection and record-keeping.)

Institutional Specifics

Compare honors and non-honors numbers/outcomes in each area listed below.

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Honors program/college and institutional research/analytics teams.

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Honors program/college and institutional research/analytics teams.

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Honors and institutional admissions/scholarship office.

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Honors and institutional research/analytics team.

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Honors and disciplinary colleges or units within the institution – compare cost per student with statistics for comparative populations.

These practices can include research, internships, study abroad, fellowship application, and community-engaged learning.

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Honors and the various offices on campus that organize [and track] these kinds of learning OR other units that might report these impacts on students.

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Honors and institutional research/analytics team.

This can include student surveys and data on honors as an enrollment driver, student hours attempted and completed, and graduation rates at the institution for students with any honors contact.

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Honors, admissions, and institutional research/analytics team.

This can include administrative, faculty, staff, and student leadership.

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Honors and all student, faculty, and staff organizations on campus.

If applicable, this can also include impact on faculty.

Possible Sources:

Honors and faculty departments, if different.

This can include numbers of promoted/tenured faculty engaged in honors, numbers who use documentation from honors to make their cases, and co-authored or student-research-driven publications.

Possible Sources:

Honors, Provost’s office or unit that collects promotion and tenure materials, institutional research/analytics team.

*Student attending due to honors opportunities at your institution.

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Honors and admissions and/or institutional research/analytics team.

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Honors and institutional research/analytics team.

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Honors and institutional scholarship/fellowship office, if different.

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Honors, departments/colleges, and institutional research/analytics team.

*Particularly those mentoring research or creative work.

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Honors and office of research or institutional research-tracking mechanisms.

This includes numbers of monetary or service donors.

Possible Sources:

Honors and alumni relations and/or development offices.

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National Benchmarks and/or Peer Institutional Data

Use these to contextualize each point of institutional data outlined above.

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Access and Inclusion in Honors

Advocacy involves communicating the value of honors education for all, with a focus on how it can creates inclusive communities and pioneers approaches to supporting a variety of student populations. NCHC identifies best practices and strategies for making honors inclusive and accessible (e.g., holistic admissions practices, curricular diversification, and faculty and staff diversification). See NCHC’s Diversity and Inclusion toolkit, particularly the recent NCHC position paper, “Honors Enrollment Management: Toward a Theory and Practice of Inclusion.”

Other relevant NCHC publications include the following:

  • Occupy Honors Education. Ed. Lisa L. Coleman, Jonathan D. Kotinek, and Alan Y. Oda. Lincoln: National Collegiate Honors Council, 2017. NCHC Monograph Series.
  • Setting the Table for Diversity. Ed. Lisa L. Coleman and Jonathan D. Kotinek. Lincoln: National Collegiate Honors Council, 2010. NCHC Monograph Series.
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Honors Partnerships and Campus Leadership

Advocating for honors education requires building an institutional understanding of how and why honors education is central to the institutional mission and goals. Fostering institutional and community partnerships and building recognition of the role honors plays in institutional and community decisions and strategies are key parts of advocacy. A recent JNCHC forum on “Current Challenges in Honors Education” addresses this issue, as well as others. See in particular the response “Honors and the Curiouser University.”

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Showcasing Honors through Storytelling

Formats for Sharing Success:
  • Blogs
  • Newsletters: See recent NCHC newsletter contest winners
  • Press releases - Work with your marketing group on campus so that they know to ask whether students and faculty are connected with honors for all press releases and so they think of showcasing honors in press releases. Also be sure to request press releases as appropriate.
  • Social media - Work with your marketing group on campus to highlight and share your program successes.
Formats for Recruiting Students and Faculty

Honors programs and colleges can house brief video testimonials on their websites, on social media, and on a program YouTube channel. People from the following categories listed below (with the recommended target audiences) provide great video (or written) testimonials, particularly if they describe one aspect of honors that they love.

  • Student testimonials: aimed at all honors stakeholders; students articulate the value of honors, both personally and professionally.
  • Parent testimonials: aimed at incoming students and parents.
  • Faculty testimonials: aimed at students, other faculty, and administrators.
  • Alumni/donor testimonials: aimed at students, alumni, and administrators.
  • Honors directors and deans testimonials: aimed at students, parents, faculty, alumni, and administrators.
  • Institutional administrators (provosts, presidents) testimonials: aimed at institutional, regional, and national community.

Events can draw attention to the value of honors and the vibrancy of the honors community. Inviting administrators, alumni/donors, and other stakeholders maximizes impact of the event. Listed below are some sample event types and possible invitees.

  • Research symposia and poster presentations: on-campus branding with honors as a sponsor.
  • Honors professor/instructor/teacher of the year events: Honors students nominate outstanding faculty, a student committee interviews and selects one faculty member to feature, and honors hosts a community event showcasing outstanding teaching in and beyond honors at the institution.
  • Honors recognition, commendation, and other public ceremonies:
    • Recognition ceremonies can feature students who have won awards, fellowships, and scholarships, as well as staff and faculty who have supported honors students and the program/college. Donors who have created scholarships can personally make awards and meet recipients and their families, as appropriate.
    • Commendation ceremonies recognize graduating honors students and can feature student, faculty, or alumni speakers.
  • Pedagogical retreats for honors and/or other interested faculty.
  • City as Text and Partners in the Parks: publicize institutionally; research on these topics includes the following:
  • NCUR, research at the capitol, state research conferences, and regional honors council conferences.
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Recruitment Ideas

  • Open some seats in honors courses to prospective non-honors students. Use partnerships with other offices (research, inclusion, community engagement, global engagement) to target these invitations to students who might not otherwise consider honors.
  • Develop honors student and faculty ambassador programs.
  • Create honors “leadership academy” training/class to prepare first- and second-year students to take on key roles in honors (and other institutional) recruiting and retention activities.
  • Honors highlight sheet (parallel to college/departmental recruiting materials, regardless of whether honors is a program or college) that go with institutional recruiting staff to all events, as well as training for recruiters on how to talk about honors.
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Student Personal and Professional Development

Honors programs and colleges can communicate how their curricula shape student understanding of the value of education and teach their students to articulate that value clearly and fully for themselves. Depending on the curriculum/programming, honors educators can demonstrate student impact in various ways, including the following:

  1. Cite AAC&U high-impact practices, and map onto honors education: tie value to institution to promotion of HIPs institutionally.
  2. Define the value for students of reflection and personal/professional development and ground that value in honors education.
  3. Include examples of specific programs run by honors that contribute to students’ personal and professional development, especially those that involve written or oral reflection on learning outcomes and value of the experience. Those programs may include the following:
    • Orientation
    • Peer mentoring
    • Student ambassador roles in honors
    • Professional development workshops
    • Student and/or faculty retreats focused on learning and pedagogy
    • Conferences and research/creative work presentation
    • Travel and study abroad
    • Internships
    • Community engagement
    • Undergraduate research
    • Honors in the major work
    • Reading groups or book discussions
    • Fellowship application process
  4. Articulate benefits and contemporary necessity of interdisciplinary study and liberal education in helping students develop interpersonal and collaborative skills (e.g., AAC&U’s definition of liberal education and their Liberal Education publication).
  5. Demonstrate the impact of honors programs and colleges as laboratories for pedagogy and programming innovation through the following types of work:
    • Innovative virtual honors courses and best-practices pedagogy
    • In-person or virtual events and community-building
    • Models for engaging students and faculty mentors in undergraduate research and creative work
    • Creative approaches to orientation and recruiting
    • Ideas for engaging alumni and donors
    • Adapting creatively to external or internal constraints (e.g., natural or public health disasters)
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Annual Reporting

Annual reports are an excellent way to share the program or college story and to use data to advocate on its behalf. NCHC offers an annual report template as a starting point.

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