At Rutgers University–New Brunswick, we’ve harnessed the vast resources of our renowned research university to create something extraordinary—the uncommon Honors College, a learning-living community focused on harnessing the power of your innate curiosity, helping you achieve an unparalleled interdisciplinary depth and breadth of knowledge, and guiding you towards developing your intellectual and personal purpose.
Through these efforts we intend to inspire you, empower you, and connect you in ways that will transcend any ordinary education. This is a place founded on the notion of doing well by doing good and seeking the extraordinary—it’s at our core.
Our goal? To inspire, empower, and connect.
As a student in the Rutgers Honors College, you will be given unique opportunities from the outset, including exposure to research, extensive collaboration with fellow students and faculty, and even one-on-one discussions with live-in faculty to share ideas, develop new interests, and interact in social settings. Students collaborate in our seminar rooms, through our unique programming, and in both social and academic settings. Add to this a dedicated staff of two-dozen professionals and you have the makings of an enriched experience that will take you places beyond your existing goals.
At the center of the Honors College experience is a mission-based course, taught by faculty within the Schools from different intellectual and field-based lenses, where interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and inspired learning are the focus, and where many ideas are initiated that will shape your future learning.
Through our expanded offerings in Interdisciplinary Honor Seminars and aligned co- and extra-curricular programming, students can pursue travel abroad and service projects, and work with internationally acclaimed faculty in labs, in the archives, upon the water, and in the field, where knowledge is developed firsthand.
Each year, approximately 1,000 students are invited to begin their two-, three-, four, five, and even six-year experience as part of the Honors College and their overarching academic studies (spanning the range of Junior transfers new to Rutgers all the way to PharmD students who get their doctorate in the six-year program). Our community includes students from these liberal arts and professional schools at Rutgers–New Brunswick: the School of Arts and Sciences, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, School of Engineering, Rutgers Business School, Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, and Mason Gross School of the Arts.
Founded in 2015 and expanded in 2025, the Honors College offers an education for the twenty-first century while reflecting on the University’s rich 260 year history. With its administrative offices and programming center located on the historic College Avenue Campus, but with residence halls and programming locations on all five RUNB campuses, the Honors College rises above the ordinary. Our initial home sits on a bluff overlooking the Raritan River, where on warm days, honors students gather below the clock tower in the college’s courtyard that spills out onto a campus green framed by ivy-covered halls, a place of Revolution-era skirmishes and ancient college traditions. We seek to build on the history as we prepare you for the future.
The Honors College is more than a place where students study. It’s more than a college experience. The Honors College is a home for students who want to learn and to help make the world a better place.