Samuel Derkin: The honors college isn’t worth it

When I first came to the University of Toledo three years ago, I met with an advisor to play “sorting hat” with my next few years in college. I remember her trying to sell me on the idea of entering into the honors college. She told me that by taking harder courses and by putting extra work into regular classes, I would emerge from college leaps and bounds ahead of my peers.

And even though she assured me that the harder classes would pay off in the end, and explained all of the benefits of being an honors student, I remained unconvinced and declined her offer.

If I am completely honest, I declined for one simple reason. I did not want to be trapped in the honors program. College appealed to me because it provided avenues of learning outside of the classroom - avenues that I would find very difficult to explore if I was stuck in the classrooms in order to jump through more hoops than necessary.

Throughout my life, I have known brilliant people that practically live in honors classes. Whether it be in high school or college, they were convinced that their edge lay in more time in the classroom and in the lengthy Latin words after their degree.

I knew one friend from high school who had always done honors classes and qualified in spades for UT’s honors courses. He became a recluse; he figuratively killed himself his freshman year. I barely saw my friend for two years, and on the rare occasions I did see him, he lamented that his classes were doing nothing - nothing except preventing him from having the social experiences he was hoping to get out of college.

Now I know that not everyone is like my friend, but he was a man who loved classes and then felt trapped inside of one.

Over the past several years, I have watched UT’s goals to improve and bolster the honors college. They have created honors college housing and honor students receive early registration, select classes and, often, the best professors. And I understand why the university is doing it. Honors programs give colleges prestige and everything that stuffy academics use to say that their university is better than yours, as they shake their academic jowls and smoke oversized calabash pipes.

But still, even with all of the resources that UT has poured into the honors college to improve their standing, it seems like most who start off in the program are reluctant to finish in it.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I will be the first to say that there is nothing wrong with academics. I love college, and boy, do I love learning. And I want my university to be a place of true learning.

But I have learned more in one semester in a student organization than my academic classes have taught me in three years. And I now know that true learning happens best at an institution where student organizations are given the same attention as honors classes.

The biggest theme that I see in my classes is professors pushing students to be “critical thinkers.” Almost every assignment in my first two years of general classes had something to do with thinking critically. My English composition classes, humanities classes and communication classes all told me that they were teaching me critical thinking, and I would learn the secrets to independent thought if I only listened to them.

At the start of my second week on The Independent Collegian staff, Editor-in-Chief Danielle Gamble sat me down and told me that I had some of the worst critical thinking skills she had seen in someone my age.

I was shocked to hear that. My professors had taught me, trained me.

Hadn’t they?

In weeks of working in a student-run organization, I learned that real critical thinking doesn’t come with a grade. You won’t find it in a research paper or in a PowerPoint slide. You learn by going out there, screwing up and then learning from it. And that is what I love about student groups. They are able to provide a safe environment in which to learn what life really is by learning from your mistakes.

If I had gone into the honors college, if I’d felt tied to my grades, I wouldn’t be half as learned as I am now. Maybe if I had actually taken those honors classes, I’d be singing a different tune. But I highly doubt it - because every day, I run into honors students who haven’t had the experiences I’ve had, and who I have outstripped in key areas of both knowledge and wisdom. That’s not to say I’m the biggest genius in the world. It’s to say that I’ve found a way to stretch my academic legs, and other students have had their growth stunted against their will.

Instead of allocating resources for the “top” students and locking them into one “honored” college, why can’t we instead divvy these resources out to departments, or to the student groups that are providing the kind of real-world experiences that students need? I know that making this choice may take a little wind out of our sails in the academic world, but in the end, we came to college because we wanted to learn.

I turned down the honors college because I wanted to learn more than book smarts. That’s why the majority of qualified students are turning down the opportunity to be in the honors program - because we’re looking for something more than extra hoops to jump through. We’re looking for something real.

Samuel Derkin is a third-year double majoring in English and communication, and is the news editor at The Independent Collegian.