The Honors Experience
Transforming College Access & Experience
Rutgers University-Newark is home to two revolutionary honors programs, the Honors College, and Honors Living-Learning Community (HLLC).
Honors College
Founded in 1972, the Honors College is a hub for excellence in education, undergraduate research, and applied learning. Our interdisciplinary curriculum matches our diverse cohort of curious students with selective faculty mentors who ensure students have the tools to become collaborative, ethical leaders and thoughtful lifelong scholars. Honors College students have won Truman, Goldwater, Gates-Cambridge, and Fulbright fellowships and admission to top professional and graduate schools such as Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. In project-based classes and research-driven senior theses, Honors College students create knowledge by probing the most relevant, urgent questions of our time and enrich the intellectual life of our public university while helping to make it a force for the common good.
Honors Living-Learning Community (HLLC)
The HLLC is redefining the notion of “honors” by creating intergenerational and interdisciplinary learning communities comprised of students, faculty, and community partners focused on tackling some of the nation’s most pressing social issues. Building organically on their own knowledge and lived experiences, HLLC students learn to increase cross-cultural competence and approach local challenges that resonate globally from historical, philosophical, legal, and comparative perspectives. The curriculum provides the flexibility to focus, in and out of the classroom, on issues ranging from civil rights, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, religion, domestic and international violence, environmental justice, health inequities, and questions of democracy and citizenship.
For students with children and other family members who depend on them, the holidays can be an especially hard time to keep everyone fed. This year has been even harder with the interruption and restriction of SNAP benefits. To help fill the gaps, Rutgers-Newark leadership, issued the Compassion Challenge to collect 500 pounds of donations to fill campus food pantry shelves.
Rutgers University–Newark has been designated an Opportunity College and University, a category created for the first time by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education to recognize schools that excel at helping economically disadvantaged students find careers that pay competitive wages.
For the fourth year in a row, Rutgers-Newark has won its division of the New Jersey Ballot Bowl, a statewide non-partisan voter registration and engagement competition led by and for students.