Highline Community College is the most diverse community college in Washington state.

Making Excellence Inclusive: Community College Honors

Barbara Clinton hadn’t been planning to start an honors program. She was a professor of speech communication at Highline Community College in Des Moines, Washington, five years ago, when a student stopped by her office to say goodbye. He was leaving Highline, having earned his associate’s degree after only three quarters—a feat he had accomplished by taking twenty credits a quarter and applying the numerous AP class credits he’d brought from high school. Clinton asked him where he was going to school next, and the student said he wasn’t going to school anymore—he was going to work. He couldn't afford to pay the two more years of tuition that would allow him to earn a bachelor’s degree. That’s when the light went on in her head, Clinton says. “I told him that he didn’t need to have money—that people would pay for students like him to attend college,” she remembers. “I couldn’t imagine having a mind like his wasted.” That same day, Clinton and the student started filling out scholarship applications.

Clinton realized that there were probably other students at Highline in similar situations—bright, motivated, and wholly capable of earning a bachelor’s degree, but without the “insider knowledge” of financial aid and scholarships to make transferring seem possible. While the college used a large portion of its budget each year to ensure that struggling students were brought up to speed, there were no similar expenditures for high achievers. Clinton was still considering how to help such students when she attended a national community college conference and learned that a number of community colleges had honors programs for motivated, high-achieving students. That could work at Highline, she thought. She spent the summer of 2002 researching these programs, as well as talking to academic officers at every four-year institution in the state of Washington.

When the academic year opened, Clinton met with administrators and made her pitch: she proposed an Honors Scholars program for Highline Community College students that would emphasize high academic standards, interdisciplinary studies, and close ties to faculty members. Students in the program would receive intensive training in how to navigate the higher education system, plus benefit from formalized transfer agreements with four-year schools all over the state. 

Egalitarian Honors

“We probably had about two minutes of conversation before I realized that this was a brilliant idea,” says Highline’s interim president, Jack Bermingham, who was vice president when Clinton presented her idea. “We shifted the conversation quickly from, ‘I really want to sell you on this,’ to ‘How can we implement this?’”

Highline is strongly committed to equity, and Clinton was adamant that the honors program reflect that commitment. “The program is not elitist—faculty do not choose students for the program. Students self-elect,” she says. In this way, the program exhibits the principle of “inclusive excellence” that AAC&U is working to advance at all kinds of colleges. The result at Highline is a diverse body of scholars who closely mirror the college’s overall student population—more than 40 percent of honors scholars are nonwhite, and one-third are male.

Barbara Clinton teaches an honors seminar that she calls "boot camp on higher education."

A hallmark of Highline’s program, which Clinton now directs, is that it provides in a community college setting the type of broad-based liberal arts education commonly found in small, private institutions. Any Highline student may place him- or herself in the honors program by maintaining a 3.5 GPA in any class and completing an honors option project. These “options” are the core of the program, Clinton says. They are not pro forma, but are negotiated individually with each professor, so that students learn to develop and refine their interests. Honors students complete thirty-five credit hours of honors options, and at least five credits must be earned in each of three core areas: humanities, social sciences, and science/math.

Students also take a cohort-based seminar course that introduces them to the inner workings of higher education, and participate in a colloquium series with outside speakers. The final honors requirement is an individual capstone interdisciplinary project that must incorporate at least ten hours of service learning. And while those students who complete the thirty-five honors credits and maintain a 3.5 GPA graduate with an “Honors Scholar” designation, any student may strengthen his or her transcript by taking standalone honors options. “This program is unique in that it’s open access,” Bermingham says. “You can do just one honors course, but it encourages excellence. Sometimes it really builds into something much larger.”

“We want to work based on student interest and ‘light a fire,’” Clinton says. “We use the Yeats quote, ‘Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire,’ as our motto.”

Unlocking Doors

“The honors program is as much about development for high achievers who don’t have role models as it is about academic subjects,” Bermingham explains. Students at community colleges are often there not for lack of intelligence, but for lack of knowledge of how to achieve. To tackle this problem, Clinton teaches an honors seminar—required for students wishing to graduate with the Honors Scholar distinction—that she calls “boot camp on higher education.” Seminar participants write personal statements and scholarship essays, create several versions of their resumes, and do extensive research on four-year colleges and college scholarships. “Higher education has become more exclusive since the 1970s,” Clinton says. “Today, the strongest predictors of college degree-earning are parents’ income and parents’ degrees. That’s not democracy to me—our country can’t afford such an intellectual divide.”

Honors students benefit from close collaboration with faculty members who have graduate degrees—a new experience for most of the students. Erik Scott, a mathematics professor at Highline, says that most honors students he’s worked with have strong work ethics and focused interests, but often haven’t been exposed to research journals or academic literature. His goal is to help them learn to synthesize complex information from multiple sources. A recent honors student was interested in criminal justice, so she and Scott designed an honors project that included probability distributions, logic structure, and the type of rigorous proofs used in legal proceedings. “The students provide the lead, and I provide some of the structure,” he says. And the students are not the only ones who benefit. “[Working with honors students] helps me reignite my own passion for my discipline. I go toward what I would do in my own research, investigating connections,” Scott says. “Sharing that with a student is exciting.”

Highline’s honors program has transfer agreements with most of the four-year colleges in Washington state, including some arrangements that help channel Highline honors students into honors programs at the transfer institution. And students aiming for the Honors Scholar designation have an additional enticement beyond improving their transfer options: those who are on track to graduate as Honor Scholars receive a full-tuition scholarship for their final quarter at Highline.

Finding Success

While the Highline Honors Scholar program is still relatively new, Clinton is proud of its record so far. From its pilot group of fifteen students in 2003, the program has grown to nearly two hundred participants. In the past two years, it has produced four Gates Millennium Scholars, a USA Today Academic All-American, and a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation scholarship recipient. More than 90 percent of past honors scholars have gone on to earn a baccalaureate degree, and the forty-seven scholars who announced their graduation plans in June 2007 reported earning a combined $1.2 million in scholarships and other financial aid.

And the student who originally inspired Clinton to start the honors program? A year after their initial meeting, he was enrolled in a four-year institution with enough financial aid to put a bachelor’s degree easily within his reach. “Too often we think of “developmental” programs only in terms of curriculum,” Bermingham says. “But it’s also about helping students see possibilities.”

For more information about Highline Community College’s Honors Scholar program, visit the program’s Web page. For more information about AAC&U’s work on inclusive excellence, visit the Making Excellence Inclusive homepage.