Honors education provides opportunities for additional challenge and enrichment for oustanding undergraduate university students. Its origins in the United States can be traced from Frank Aydelotte's efforts to recreate the Oxford tutorial system at Swarthmore College in 1922. Similar efforts were adopted at other colleges and universities in the 1920s and 1930s, with a marked increase after World War II. In 1957, Joseph W. Cohen hosted a conference at the University of Colorado - Boulder that resulted in the formation of the Inter-University Committee on the Superior Student (ICSS). In 1965, the ICSS was replaced by the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC). Today, NCHC has over 900 institutional members across the United States and around the world.
Honors at Texas A&M
Opportunities for Honors study at Texas A&M University were initiated in the mid-1960s in what was then the College of Arts and Sciences. Subsequently, the Colleges of Liberal Arts, Science, and Geosciences co-sponsored an Honors Program, and by 1968 all of the academic colleges had joined in the endeavor.
In 1978, the University Honors Program offered a modest thirty honors sections of twenty different courses, with only three upper-division (300-400) courses available. Ten years later, the number of honors sections jumped to 148 in 117 different courses, but the number of upper-division sections available was still relatively small at thirty eight. Annual enrollments had climbed from 650 to over 2,000. On average, we now see over 800 sections of Honors courses are offered each academic year. Student enrollment in these courses now tops 4,000 each semester.
In Fall 2012, the University Honors Program shifted to application-based entry and began requiring freshman admitted to the program to live in the Honors Housing Community and participate in a freshman learning community seminar. Upperclassmen in the program are now required to maintain a learning portfolio and participate in Honors Student Council events each semester. The revised program also features a new graduation distinction, Honors Fellows, that requires all students to complete a capstone experience. Students participating in the University Honors Program may also take advantage of optional structured honors courses and study sequences offered in several academic colleges and a growing number of departments. in 2018, we celebrated 50 years of university-wide Honors opportunities at Texas A&M.
In Spring 2025, the program was renamed "Honors Academy" and a new minor was created for students entering the program in Fall 2025.