Honors students will have priority registration privileges starting with the upcoming summer registration.

Students in the University Honors Program will be eligible to register for classes during the same time period currently given to student athletes and seniors with 117 credits or more.

The policy went through several of NIU’s committees before being authorized for implementation.

Michael Martin, University Honors Program director, thinks the new policy shows that the university is committed to the honors program. He said honors students have been in need of priority registration to help alleviate difficulties they were facing when trying to fit honors classes into their schedules. Some students have dropped the honors program because required classes were filled before they could register.

Having a competitive program is another reason NIU needed a priority registration program for honors students, Martin said.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois State University, Western Illinois University and Eastern Illinois University all offer priority registration for their honors students.

“It is one of our key perks,” said Becky Mentzer, assistant director of the honors program at ISU.

U of I’s honors program director, Bruce Michelson, said the priority registration program provides extra help to honors students with double majors trying to pack their courses together.

“Priority registration can be a consolation for students confronted by a heavy load,” Michelson said.

Michelson considers the priority registration a positive part of the honors program, but he said it could become a problem if used for the wrong reasons. Students joining the honors program only to use the early registration privileges could affect the quality of a program.

“If a program got too big, I’d worry,” Michelson said.

Only about 500 students are in the honors program of the more than 28,000 undergraduates at U of I. NIU has about 990 honors students and an undergraduate population of about 25,000.

Getting into the popular classes offered at ISU can be difficult, so many students have joined the honors program to take advantage of the priority registration, Mentzer said. ISU has about 18,000 undergraduate students with about 2,000 students enrolled in the honors program.

Mentzer is not naive to the fact that many students want to be in the program only to use the registration priority. She tries to encourage the students to take advantage of the other benefits that come with being in the program.

Mentzer added that honors students have high academic standards they must fulfill in order to remain in the program, therefore limiting the amount of students that could join the program and abuse its privileges.

“The really good students deserve to get the perk,” Mentzer said.