Is your school on the ‘Most Stressful’ list?
April 22, 2010 by Geneva ReidPosted in: In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, Student Life
Which colleges have the most stressed-out students? Take a look at the schools that have the dubious honor of making this list. Based on U.S. Department of Education data and this year’s U.S. News and World Report rankings, The Daily Beast put together a list of the most stressful colleges.
The level of stress was determined by:
- total cost of tuition, room and board
- degree of academic competitiveness
- acceptance rate
- curriculum for engineering grad students
- amount of campus crime
Here are the top 20 schools:
1. Stanford University (CA)
2. Columbia University (NY)
3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
4. University of Pennsylvania
5. Harvard University (MA)
6. Princeton University (NJ)
7. Vanderbilt University (TN)
8. Carnegie Mellon University (PA)
9. California Institute of Technology
10. Northwestern University (IL)
11. University of Chicago (lL)
12. Yale University (CT)
13. Washington University in St. Louis (MO)
14. Dartmouth College (NH)
15. Johns Hopkins University (MD)
16. Duke University (NC)
17. Cornell University (NY)
18. University of Southern California
19. Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.)
20. Brown University (RI)
Click here for a look at the complete list of the top 50 stressful colleges.
HigherEdMorning delivers the latest HigherEd news once a week to the inboxes of over 200,000 HigherEd professionals.
Click here to sign up and start your FREE subscription to HigherEdMorning!
Tags: college stress, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. News & World Report
Loading ...
April 21st, 2010 at 12:36 pm
Want to experience real stress and low GPA? Try EECS at UC-Berkeley.
April 21st, 2010 at 3:28 pm
It would be nice to survey levels of stress of faculty also. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some correlation between stress of students and stress of faculty. I lived in DC for a while and worked at one of the places that made the top 20 and was in a position to see both student stress and faculty stress and oh, boy, was it a revealing picture. Of course the fact that the specific institution was also located in one of the most expensive areas in the country (for housing) also makes sense. Economics and competition are key factors of stress. For both students and faculty.
April 21st, 2010 at 4:12 pm
I went to a very stressful school–try using your schools’ suicide rate as a factor to determine the “Most Stressful” (that’s what our Board of Visitors used).
April 22nd, 2010 at 8:09 am
This “ranking” seems to be useless and somewhat irresponsible to publish. If one really wants to know how stressful an academic college or university is, he or she should survey the actual student population, not look at indicators from third-parties.
- Very disappointed
April 28th, 2010 at 11:53 am
Considering the virtue of valid indicators of stress and their directional effect (+, higher indicator, higher stress; – lower (or higher) indicator, higher (or lower) stress:
1) Graduation rate (-)
Average distance to classes (+)
2) Average GPA (-)
3) Thesis required (+)
4) Student to faculty ratio (-)
5) Administrator to student ratio (-)
6) Free mental health services on campus (-)
7) Number of fraternities/sororities (+)
9) % of students working (+)
10) Crime rate (+)
I expected better from your organization.
May 19th, 2010 at 7:18 pm
Yes, the criteria are odd, at best.
What are we to make of the outcome that some of the “happiest” schools are the “most stressful”?