A recent arti­cle in The New York Times dis­cussed crit­i­cism that too many honor soci­eties in Amer­i­can high schools is, well, not very hon­or­able. Reporter Win­nie Hu writes that honor soci­eties started out ways to dis­tin­guish the “top 5 or 10 per­cent of a class but have become a rou­tine item on col­lege résumés.” More­over, the sheer num­ber of soci­eties now avail­able for mem­ber­ship (some are national soci­eties with local chap­ters while oth­ers are unique to each high school) does not nec­es­sar­ily trans­late into sub­stan­tive expe­ri­ences for the members.

This arti­cle res­onated with my own expe­ri­ence with honor soci­eties in high school and their ulti­mate role in col­lege admis­sions. I was a mem­ber of my high school’s chap­ter of the National Honor Soci­ety as well as vice-president of our Span­ish Honor Soci­ety. Pick­ing up our mem­ber­ship pins was the extent of the involve­ment required for the for­mer and plan­ning the next class of mem­bers’ induc­tion cer­e­mony com­prised my vice-presidential respon­si­bil­i­ties. Pretty lim­ited. Imag­ine my sur­prise when I got to col­lege and learned that NHS is a huge time com­mit­ment at many high schools!

Part of the prob­lem seems to be that by the time stu­dents are inducted into these honor soci­eties (often at the end of junior year or begin­ning of senior year), stu­dents have already estab­lished their extracur­ric­u­lar com­mit­ments and it is dif­fi­cult to demand that the very stu­dents being rewarded for their high achieve­ments tack on addi­tional activ­i­ties. Fac­ulty spon­sors and brave chap­ter pres­i­dents must walk a fine line between ful­fill­ing a society’s goals and not bur­den­ing its mem­bers with fur­ther obligations.

The NYT arti­cle also dis­cusses crit­i­cisms that as more honor soci­eties are estab­lished, the degree of “honor” asso­ci­ated with them dimin­ishes. This is a point where I am some­what torn; on the one hand, I agree with the argu­ment that mak­ing mem­ber­ship in an honor soci­ety extremely acces­si­ble (by hav­ing such a mul­ti­tude of orga­ni­za­tions) rather con­tra­dicts the very mean­ing of an honor soci­ety. At the same time, how­ever, I don’t want to imply that var­i­ous fields (lan­guages, the arts, etc) do not merit their own orga­ni­za­tions with which high schools can rec­og­nize stu­dents who have achieved in a given area of study.

I did not see the poten­tial down­side to boast­ing two honor soci­ety mem­ber­ships on my col­lege appli­ca­tions until I started doing alumni inter­views. Sud­denly I real­ized that if they asked to talk about either orga­ni­za­tion, I would have almost noth­ing to say—what’s the point of that? I think that I only ended up being asked once about the NHS, which I hon­estly explained is treated more like an hon­orary soci­ety than an honor soci­ety at my high school. The dis­tinc­tion is impor­tant, espe­cially when list­ing these orga­ni­za­tions on a résumé or list of activ­i­ties. Get­ting stuck in a sit­u­a­tion where it’s clear that mem­ber­ship does not trans­late into sub­stan­tive experience—and this was not artic­u­lated on the ini­tial application—is not very con­ducive towards aca­d­e­mic and pro­fes­sional success.

As the arti­cle cited here dis­cusses, some high schools have actu­ally cut exist­ing honor soci­eties in order to com­bat this prob­lem. While I see the value in this action, my first choice would be for high schools to clearly con­vey the objec­tive of each orga­ni­za­tion so that the role of each mem­ber is clear. If the soci­ety is intended to be purely hon­orary, then say so. Fur­ther­more, it may be use­ful for high schools to limit the num­ber of honor soci­eties to which each stu­dent can belong. This would encour­age stu­dents to actu­ally con­sider their inter­ests rather than sim­ply try to rack up as many mem­ber­ships as pos­si­ble which, as we see from the arti­cle, may not actu­ally help them in col­lege admissions.

It’s a tricky situation—what do you think? Did you belong to an honor soci­ety in high school? Do you think that doing so (or not) made a dif­fer­ence in your col­lege admis­sions results?