Statistics Say You’re Stressed Out

The most stressful part about Harvard is getting in, right? Wrong.

On its list of the 50 Most Stressful Colleges, The Daily Beast—an online news site—ranked Harvard fifth, behind Stanford, Columbia, MIT, and Penn. The schools were ranked based on a hodgepodge of disparate categories: cost, competitiveness, acceptance rate, crime on campus, and the ranking of their engineering programs.

According to the Beast, the more students have to worry about money, the more they stress.  Harvard’s hefty cost is definitely a source of anxiety for some students. But the Daily Beast fails to account for Harvard’s generous financial aid, which helps to take off some of the pressure.

It’s the school work, however, that really boosts Harvard’s ranking. The Beast ranked Harvard and Princeton as the most academically challenging schools in the nation.

That’s right. Our school is harder than Yale, MIT and Caltech.

According to the Daily Beast’s logic, Harvard’s minute acceptance rate is also a source of frustration for students, even after they get in. “More competitive schools generally produce a more competitive student body,” the post reads.

The Beast also seems to think that schools with better engineering programs are inherently more stressful. Advantage, MIT. Our neighbor down the river bolstered its stress ranking with the top engineering program in the country. Meanwhile Harvard’s sits at number 15.

The last factor the Beast considered was the amount of crime on campus.  Apparently, our little bubble isn’t that safe—Harvard was ranked the second least-safe campus of the schools considered. No. 1? Tufts University.

Where did the rest of the Ivies rank? Princeton came in at 6, Yale at 12, Dartmouth at 14, Cornell at 17, and Brown rounded out the Ancient Eight at 20.

Photo by Corey M. Rennell '07/The Harvard Crimson.