The mission of The Honors College at Bluefield State College is to provide for its students exceptional educational opportunities within a dynamic community of faculty and students sharing a commitment to academic excellence as well as social and intellectual growth. The Honors College provides intensive seminars, civic engagement, discovery experiences, and research opportunities in a diverse curricular and extra- curricular array appropriate for students from their first day of classes through graduation. The Honors College and its programs endeavor to promote intellectual rigor, creativity, faculty-student engagement, academic integrity, inclusiveness, and ethical communitarian engagement.

More specifically, the Honors College mission goals are the following:

  • Foster intellectual breadth and depth in students through a broad but integrated educational program, one that joins reading, writing, research, critical thinking, and debate in the liberal arts and sciences with the student’s specific discipline and focused program of study;
  • Provide an enhanced academic curriculum that runs parallel to the students chosen academic program and course of study. This enhanced curriculum will supplement course curricula by encompassing greater depth and breadth of the subject matter and discipline, encouraging the development of independent, creative, and critical thinking skills, and providing more frequent and detailed faculty feedback;
  • Enable students to seek to understand how social, economic, and political actions affect campus, local, and global communities towards addressing problems and promoting communitarian well-being. This is done to cultivate the student into an informed, open-minded, and responsible citizen attentive to improving the communities in which s/he lives;
  • Enable students to ethically value, respect, and learn from diverse cultures, races, ages, genders, sexual orientations, and religions. Students will have opportunities to demonstrate openness, inclusiveness, sensitivity, and the ability to interact respectfully with all people and understand others’ differences;
  • Enable and enhance student academic and professional development through research, presentations, scholarships, internships, study abroad, awards, organizational leadership, honor societies, and employment.