Mission Statement

The Ramapo College Honors Program is a community of faculty and students dedicated to intellectual, creative, and moral engagement. Honors students seek excellence through continual guidance and a distinctive curriculum of critical thinking, intercultural and international understanding, experiential learning, service, and interdisciplinary studies. The end of the program is the beginning of an enriched and accomplished life.

Ramapo College of New Jersey invites incoming first-year students, current Ramapo freshmen in their first semester, and second-semester freshman transfer-students to consider admission into the College Honors Program. Completion of the program includes six courses, a project related to the student’s major, and curriculum-based civic engagement. Students will also become part of an intentional learning community designed to ignite the imagination of all students at the College so that all our students become engaged in their own learning.

In the College Honors Program, intellectual development is inseparable from one’s own growth and development as a whole human being. Students work with faculty mentors who monitor their progress as engaged learners and as contributing members of the college, the wider community and society.

Good academic standing is a consequence of the engaged values of a College Honors student, not the primary goal. Self-motivated intellectual independence from extrinsic rewards is the distinctive disposition of a College Honors student. Intellectual strengths are essential to academic engagement but intellectual strengths, by themselves, are not adequate to define the attitude of academic engagement. Consider the College Honors Program:

• If you long for the personal experience of fulfillment that comes from encountering new ideas in dialogue with others
• If you approach your scholarly research in a deeply personal manner
• If you are seeking to find ways to contribute to society

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

~Mary Oliver

Contacts