Honors Ambassadors: A Framework for Enhancing Student and Program Development

Many honors programs struggle with how to attract the best and brightest students, primarily because the students we seek often have multiple lucrative offers from highly rated institutions. At Miami University, we found ourselves in the unfortunate position of losing top-tier students to competitor programs in the region and state and thus needing to take action. Our first step was to take a critical look at the scope and type of communication we were having with prospective students. What we found was that although we offer an excellent honors program with learning opportunities that are equivalent to or perhaps better than those of our competitors, we were not doing an adequate job of communicating our strengths to prospective students. In our quest to attract top scholars to our institution, we determined that the answer to staying competitive would be drastic expansion of our marketing and communication efforts