My alma mater , NC State, gave honorary doctorates to Dean Kamen and Steve Wozniak. They are both well known but I don’t know of any connection they have to NCSU.
Maybe they know somebody on the board of trustees or the chancellor?
I wondered the same thing a while back.
Colleges tend to honour public figures, artists, activists, academics, and celebrities whose achievements in some way reflect the values of the university. Most of the time honorees are required to collect their “doctorates” in person and deliver a few remarks to the graduating students. These often get reported in the press which the College tends to think of as a Good Thing.
Rather than “know[ing] somebody on the board of trustees or the chancellor”, competition for top names is fierce. Universities send out invitations at least a year in advance for big-names and the number of honorary degrees conferred each year seems to be swelling. According to an analysis by Zachary Crockett at Priceonomics, Harvard has doled out 64% of its total honorary degrees in just the past 15 years, and this is a school that’s been around for nearly 400 years.
It all started in England and the very first one on record was a brazen attempt to score points with a wealthy and politically connected bishop named Lionel Woodville. In 1478, Oxford delivered an unearned doctorate to Woodville’s door and the influential bishop returned the favour by accepting a position as chancellor of the university.
Apparently UVA, MIT, Stanford and Cornell explicitly ban the practice.
Also I have noticed when professor jobs are listed as open they always say you need an earned doctorate to qualify. I guess that’s because an honorary degree is considered a real degree.
It helps if you are a Professional Wrestler.
Seriously–the standards are pretty loose & sloppy.
According to my alma mater it should be somehow related to the values of the school. Either the person has a direct connection to the school or area, such as presidents of local companies, or someone who has been invited to speak at the commencement. There are approximately 4-5 recipients per year. Interestingly enough, it is the only way to get a doctorate from my college as it only offers bachelor degrees.
And if the recipient is found guilty of a crime, they will lose their honorary degree. Take a look at Bill Cosby’s list of honorary degrees. It is rare that an honorary degree was not rescinded.
The university I used to work for *may confer an honorary doctorate on an individual who has demonstrated outstanding achievement and distinction in a field or activity consonant with the work of the School and with its mission to improve society and understand the “causes of things".
*. They open a call for suggestions and nominations each year, and then a sifting committee makes recommendations to the governing body.
Art the university I attended:
*When higher doctorates are conferred honoris causa the recipients are individuals of outstanding national, or usually international, achievement in their field and normally no more than eight are conferred in a year. Recipients can be of any nationality.
Occasionally the Master of Arts degree (MA) is also conferred as a titular honorary degree, on those who have made exceptional and direct contributions to the life of the University or City of Cambridge.
*
Other institutions might be looking to honour donors or just to associate themselves with people whose fame might run off on them. Possibly.
There was a degree of political embarrassment when the government of the day was courting Ceasescu"s Romania, as a semi-dissident within the Soviet sphere of influence, and it became clear that Elena Ceausescu wanted an honorary degree (despite being an obvious academic fraud). University after university declined until eventually some institution was prevailed upon to award some piece of paper that seemed to satisfy them.
Rice does too.
I can verify in some cases, the people receiving honorary degrees request them. This raised a bit of a stink several years ago when Bill Cosby demanded an honorary degree as part of his renumeration for giving a commencement address. Rice did not back down from its longstanding policy of not doing so, and he eventually settled (after more than a year) for the university making up an award for ‘service to education’.
In hindsight, the university not relenting on this point is probably for the best, considering the number of his honorary degrees that have since been revoked.
Yeah, they ask around for nominations and then a committee sifts them. The one time I made a nomination for my alma mater, it turned out that he had already gotten an honorary degree from them.
When I graduated they gave a degree to the new president of the Ivory coast Felix Houphouet-Boigny who gave an address in French. The program included a translation. How they decided on him is a mystery to me.
Who will bring them the most publicity and the least embarrassment, and has contributed/offers to contribute cash.
The process I’ve seen as a prof:
A committee makes a list, drawing from their own wish lists as well as those submitted by others. These “others” can be profs, administrators, trustees, big donors and who knows who else.
The committee narrows down the list, does a bit of vetting, comes up with a short list and starts contacting people starting from the top of the list to see if they want to participate in the process and get the degree. (Many of the most famous people get way too many such requests to accept them all or a person might have personal reasons to decline.)
Once everything is pretty much worked out then the committee submits the person, giving the reason and the type of degree to be bestowed, to the faculty to vote on. We all mutter “yea” under our breath because we don’t care (usually) and just want the meeting to move onto the next item.
Note that a lot of honorary degrees are awarded at regular graduation ceremonies with the speaker often receiving one and sometimes other folk. But I’ve attended ceremonies awarding such degrees at non-graduation events.
Given the common (but not required) association with graduation speakers and honorary degrees, one really important factor in choosing a person for either/both is: Are they rich and likely to donate to the college?
Seriously, this matters a lot for the big slot and oftentimes for lesser awardings.
So, going back to the OP’s question about Dean Kamen and Steve Wozniak getting honorary degrees. The reason is extremely obvious to me.
Woz yes, obviously, but the guy who played Superman!? And that’s when I used google.
Don’t recall any news about Woz and Kamen donating to NCSU but I guess they don’t publicize that kind of donation. I suppose since it’s a public school I could ask for a list of donors during those years.
And what about expenses? Is the University expected to pay the travelling and accommodation expenses of the honoree? Is there generally an item in the budget for honorary degrees? Do they receive an additional fee for their efforts?
I can look at the financial statements of my university (McGill, in Montreal (Canada)), and any one of several non-salary expense categories (1st page after the auditor’s report) could cover any such expenses.
At the spring 2019 convocation, there were 14 honorary degrees given out - one for each graduation ceremony (spread out over several days - including 2 for Science and 3 for Arts). Each recipient was in a field of that particular Faculty.
The recipients and their bios:
Sometimes the rich(-ish) honoree had previously donated in the years before. Quite often they donate after the award. And of course there are those that never donate after the award.
(I suspect the word gets out after a while and the honoree starts getting fewer awards.)
University’s pay for all sorts of visitors. I was asked to visit several colleges over the years, sometimes as a job candidate sometimes just to give a research talk. (The line between the two is quite blurry. You go around for a day or two talking to faculty and whatnot. You give a talk. You are taken out for dinner. Etc. If you meet the Dean or some such, that’s a job interview. Usually.) I would be paid for travel, hotel, meals, etc. I would also get honorariums which were nicely well above minimum wage. 
I’d imagine for someone who takes up a much larger fraction of Wikipedia than I do, the expenses that school would be okay with paying are higher as well as the honorarium or whatever.
I expect they pay for airfare, hotel and meals for the people getting the degree. Around here it’s usually 1 honorary degree per graduation ceremony at NCSU, Duke and UNC. I don’t think Kamen or Wozniak said anything other than maybe “Thank you”
Not too long ago at NCSU the graduation speaker had to cancel at the last minute so a professor asked his friend Phil Donahue to speak. Some GOP students got mad and left when he started to talk because he made a point that he was a liberal.
Do any post-secondary schools issue honorary Associates or Bachelors degrees? Such would be amusing. “And for 3rd-grade dropout Alley Oop, an honorary AA in Primal Studies.” [applause]
I just did a search on “honorary bachelor’s degree” and “honorary associate’s degree” and found many websites mentioning that a college had given out such degrees. I suspect that they were given for roughly the same reason that honorary doctorates are given out. A college wants to honor someone, for whatever reason, but the college only offers bachelor’s (or even only associate’s) degrees. There are a lot of colleges in the U.S. anyway that only offer those degrees. They want to offer a few honorary degrees, but they have decided that it wouldn’t be right to offer degrees beyond what they offer in regular degrees.
One college I was a prof at did not offer any (real) graduate degrees. Nonetheless, they awarded honorary doctorates. There are no accreditation bodies that monitors awarding of honorary degrees.
Colleges may also hand out honorary degrees with “fields” that have no actual corresponding real degree offered by the college.
So it gets quite silly when some honorees consider it something like a real degree, a few going so far as to using “Dr.” as their expected form of address.
PatrickLondon’s link (about the practices of the University of Cambridge in awarding honorary Master of Arts degrees) is an example for exactly that. Unlike its name suggests, the Oxbridge Master of Arts really is a bachelor’s degree. It is an undergraduate degree (with a duration of normally three years) which is initially awarded as a Bachelor of Arts, but after a waiting period following graduation, it can, upon application, be converted into an MA. This process does not require any additional academic merits, its is a mere renaming; the degree remains an undergraduate one in substance. This is generally understood on the British employment market.
Oxford and Cambridge do, of course, also offer real master’s degrees. These are, however, not styled “Master of Arts” but something different (e.g. Master of Science, or Master of Philosophy). Confusingly, there exists also the reverse situation, degrees that are postgraduate in substance but styled as bachelor’s degrees, e.g. the Bachelor of Civil Law at Oxford, which corresponds to an LL.M. elsewhere. So for Oxford graduate John Doe MA, BCL, the MA is the undergraduate degree and the BCL is the master’s.
It seems peculiarly English to have a Bachelor degree that is equivalent to a Masters degree, and to call it a Civil Law degree, while restricting eligibility only to students who hold undergraduate common law degrees. (Those with civil law undergraduate degrees take the Magister Juris degree.)