Ranking Says Harvard Students More Stressed

Harvard has a habit of being near the top of many rankings. "U.S. News & World Report" routinely deems the College among the best in the world, and the Medical School and the Business School usually grace the top three spots as well.

Harvard earned another distinction yesterday,  but this one was not quite as enviable.

The Daily Beast ranked Harvard third in its listing of "2011's Most Stressful Colleges," bumping Harvard up two spots from last year's lackluster fifth place finish. Only Columbia and Stanford beat the College this time around, while Cambridge neighbor MIT finished seventh in the standings.

To create this list, The Daily Beast looked at several statistics but did not poll students who attend the universities. The school's cost of tuition plus room and board (not taking into account financial aid), the college's acceptance rate, the local crime rate, and the rigor of the university’s engineering program accounted for 65 percent of each school's stress score.

Caltech, a notoriously stressful school, didn't even crack the top 10, and Washington University in St. Louis finished fifth largely due to the city of St. Louis' high crime rate.

This all begs the question: with a hefty sticker price, a low acceptance rate, and a high crime rate, where was Yale? Our New Haven counterpart finished tenth, behind Vanderbilt (eighth) and Northwestern (ninth).