“Connecting Honors for All”: Reimagining the Two-Year Honors Program in the Age of Guided Pathways

Over the past three years, honors faculty at South Florida State College, a two-year college offering a limited number of workforce baccalaureates, have reinvented their program. Rather than the themed seminars and exploratory courses popular with an earlier generation, our honors courses now offer students project-based, faculty-guided opportunities for undergraduate research within our general education course sequence. Students thus participate in honors while meeting their state- and program-specific general education requirements, and they do not run the risk of jeopardizing their financial aid by incurring “excess hours.” This focus allows us to connect honors education to the vocationally oriented goals most of our students bring to their educations. We use a model of honors education developed in the technical universities of The Netherlands, which we are now adapting to a two-year college in the United States. Our purposes are aligned with theirs: to make honors education available to talented students seeking a career or technical degree rather than a liberal arts baccalaureate