Cum laude, magna cum laude and summa cum laude are graduation honors that for decades have been a goal for many high-achieving U.S. college students and seemingly a fascination for others.
Written in Latin, these academic distinctions convey a high place of honor and are a source of pride for graduating undergraduates whose final cumulative GPA reaches a certain threshold.
Latin honors are a fixture in the higher education system, in part because of the traditions colleges like to uphold. However, these graduation honors can heighten anxiety during school and do not yield long-term higher income after college, contrary to some students’ expectations, some observers note.
What Are Latin Honors?
Latin honors are awarded to students at the end of their academic career at a college or university. There are typically three categories: cum laude or “with honor,” magna cum laude or “with great honor” and summa cum laude or “with highest honor.”
Not every student receives a Latin honor. Only students with a certain GPA, the highest in the class, receive the designations. The ranges of GPAs that correspond with which category differ from institution to institution.
While a 4.0 GPA may constitute a summa cum laude honor at almost every school, a 3.79 GPA may qualify as cum laude at one college and no honor at another.
For instance, at George Mason University in Virginia, the Latin honors thresholds are set at 3.5-3.69 for cum laude, 3.7-3.89 for magna cum laude and 3.9-4.0 for summa cum laude. Unless notified otherwise, students can see what Latin honors they are on track to receive based on their cumulative GPA leading up to graduation.
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This is not the case at a school like Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, where Latin honor thresholds are calculated based on the percentage of the GPA of the previous three years’ graduating seniors. The top 5% of the previous three years’ graduating seniors constitutes summa cum laude, the next 8% qualifies as magna cum laude and the next 12% is cum laude.
Some schools don’t use a Latin honors system. Michigan State University, for example, bestows “with high honor” on the top 6% of graduating students and “with honor” on the top 7% to 20%.
This sort of recognition “serves as a motivation for students to try to achieve their goals and strive for academic excellence,” says Steven Shablin, Michigan State’s university registrar. “I know many of our students are encouraged by the honors to work harder, stay committed and achieve hard goals.”
Some say differences in qualifications and bias in grading make Latin honors subjective.
Grading historically has “incorporated things like attendance, participation, sometimes dress code,” says Doug McKenna, George Mason’s university registrar. “These practices are still in place today and you can see how problematic a graduation distinction or honor that differentiates a student from other students based on this collection of subjective and reductive grades translates into a GPA.”
McKenna suggests that the differences span college campuses across the U.S.
“Grades are not good motivators except to cheat,” he says. “They decrease student trust between the instructor and themselves. They decrease collaboration between themselves and other students. They decrease engagement with the subject matter. All these things are super negative things when you think about what the challenges of the 21st century and beyond require of our students in order to combat those things.”
How Have Latin Honors Evolved?
Before the standardization of academic letter or number grading in the 20th century, colleges used honor distinctions to recognize students who displayed scholarly achievement.
The first Latin honors were introduced at Harvard University in Massachusetts in 1870 as a graduation distinction for academic excellence, simply with the phrase “cum laude.” By 1879, Harvard was bestowing cum laude, magna cum laude and summa cum laude, according to a Harvard newsletter retrospective.
As the modern grading system began taking shape — combining distinctions, alphabetical grades and the 100-point scale — GPAs took on their current form, carrying with them the early iterations of scholarly distinction, McKenna says.
[READ: How to Become a Rhodes Scholar.]
What Do Latin Honors Mean After Graduation?
The use of Latin honors continues today as an academic distinction meant to spotlight scholarly students.
Graduation honors are usually found on academic transcripts, permanent notation of a student’s excellence while in school. This documentation that can help a student after they graduate, Shablin says.
Employers “may look at your transcript and what differentiates you from the next person in having those graduation honors,” he says, adding that such an honor could also enhance graduate school applications.
However, outside of academia, it’s not as big of a deal as some may think, according to a recent study. Graduation honors on a transcript or resume reflect the performance of a motivated student, but that’s the extent of their staying power, some observers say.
In a 2018 study titled “The Effect of Latin Honors on Earnings,” researchers found that cum laude graduates from Ohio schools who remained in Ohio earned a higher income than recent graduates who did not earn Latin honors. But this effect was short-term.
“We find that (Latin) honors increases earnings by around 4% at selective schools and we find no effect on earnings for students at non-selective schools,” Ben Ost, one of the study’s authors and an associate professor of economics at the University of Illinois—Chicago, wrote in an email. “The earnings increase at selective schools is not permanent, however. By the third year after graduation, students who obtained honors earn no more than students who did not obtain (Latin) honors.”
The study also noted that monetary benefits of Latin honors decreased the further students were out of school and affected only students from “selective schools.”
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Advice on Striving for Latin Honors
Latin honors and graduation distinctions are based on GPAs. To obtain them takes dedication and persistence, reinforcing the idea that college “is a marathon, not a sprint,” Shablin says. “I think having standards, when you set them high, students achieve that and higher.”
However, when students set out to achieve Latin honors early in their academic career, it may harm their mental health, says leadership development coach Traci Callandrillo of Texas-based Callandrillo Consulting Group.
She asserts that a mindset to attain Latin honors often precedes college. During the college application process, some applicants enter a highly competitive environment where they try to stand out from peers.
This mindset can persist into college and take a toll on mental health, Callandrillo says.
Prior to her consulting career, Callandrillo was an assistant vice president of campus life and executive director of the counseling center at American University in Washington, D.C. She saw how striving to achieve Latin honors affected some students’ wellness.
“I can tell you a story of a person who came in, it was his second week of school, he was very stressed out and he said, ‘I have to get summa cum laude, I have to,’ and I’m thinking ‘wow, dude, you are 18 years old,’ and a lot of our work was helping him understand what that meant.”
Such stress can increase closer to graduation as a student weighs next steps, she says, adding that an obsession with achieving Latin honors “just adds more to that pressure cooker.”
While Latin honors can be an incentive to do better in school and make the highest grades possible, it’s also important to maintain wellness as a student.
McKenna says ambitious students have always chased top grades, but grades shouldn’t distract from the purpose of an education.
“The measurement of learning should be what the student has learned.”
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What to Know About Latin Honors in College originally appeared on usnews.com
