Greetings from Dean Alison J. Smith! Welcome to the Honors College! Kent State University's Honors program is one of the oldest in the country, and today is a thriving and exciting community with students from every college within the university.  

Designed to be a rigorous course for incoming honors students, Freshman Honors Colloquium is a required two-semester sequence that stresses works, ideas, and values significant in literary and intellectual history, as they shape and are shaped by today's culture.  

The Kent State University Honors College is proud to begin our 2nd year of Honors Leadership Academy, which connects incoming Honors College freshmen to leadership learning and civic engagement in our local community.  Students are selected to apply for this new initiative based on excellent high school leadership experiences.  

The Senior Honors Thesis/Project is a 6-credit-hour independent project. It may be a research, creative, or applied project and is completed under the direction of a faculty member.

Students with high academic excellence, and evidence of leadership, community service and/or research experience should seriously consider applying for a scholarship. The scholarships listed here are intensely competitive, but serious applicants reap plentiful rewards from the process. 

Each year faculty members who themselves were chosen for membership in Phi Beta Kappa at their undergraduate institutions meet and discuss exceptional Kent State students in the liberal arts.  There are over half a million members, but only about 10 percent of the nation's institutions of higher learning have Phi Beta Kappa chapters and only about 10 percent of the arts and sciences graduates at these institutions are selected for membership.