National Collegiate Honors Council

The National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) is a professional association of undergraduate honors programs, colleges, directors, deans, faculty, staff, and students. NCHC has 1,342 members in the United States and abroad, providing support for institutions and individuals to develop and expand honors education. The organization has its national headquarters at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Through its annual conference, professional networking, and publications, NCHC provides a platform for honors curriculum development,program assessment, national and international study opportunities, internships, honors advising, scholarships, independent research, program assessment and job listings. NCHC also maintains links with regional and state honors organizations.

The National Collegiate Honors Council promotes academic opportunity for honors students and faculty at two-year and four-year undergraduate public and private colleges and universities. In recent years honors models have been developed in several countries, and international membership in the organization has expanded. Keyed to high-end students, it fosters an intellectual environment that values scholarship, creativity, and social engagement. NCHC is one of the few academic organizations in which students, faculty and administrators participate equally in shared experiences [4] . It has evolved developed several hallmark programs that bring participants from diverse institutions together expressly for integrative learning: City as Text™ (shared explorations of urban settings), Honors Semesters (study abroad as a cohort of honors students and faculty), and Partners in the Parks (week-long adventures in American national parks). All have evolved as experiential—out-of-classroom—models of teaching and learning.

The concept of an honors education in the western university tradition can be traced to the establishment of ‘pass’ and ‘honors’ degree designations at Oxford and Cambridge Universities in 1830. Harvard was the first American institution to offer a degree with honors. By the 1920s liberal arts colleges had developed honors curricula, and many departmental majors offered honors designations. By the late 1930s, over 100 honors programs existed in the United States, a number that remained stable until the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957; the “space race” that followed gave American educators the thrust needed to support enriched education for high-end students. In 1957, the Inter-University Committee on the Superior Student (ICSS) was formed as a clearinghouse for information on honors activities. ICSS received funds from the Carnegie Corporation, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Office of Education to help establish honors programs at colleges and universities across the United States. In 1965, ICSS disbanded when its external funding expired.

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