<p>Lehigh is no longer one of the schools featured in Baron's guide to the "most competitive" colleges and universities. This struck me as a major surprise, and I was just wondering if anybody knew why.</p>
<p>Lehigh has always been on the threshold of those "most competitive rankings"...so it tends to bounce around a bit between most-competitive and one notch below. Take some solice in the USNews rankings which had Lehigh as one of the biggest gainers in their national rankings....up to 32nd place this year.</p>
<p>That's exactly what confused me. Every organization rates colleges differently; but I figured that if Baron seems to rate by things other than numbers and statistics there must have been something of particular note.</p>
<p>It surprised me because my brother is starting his freshman year there. He's found that the reputation for drinking is overstated, the classes are very intense (he studies a lot, more so than friends at other competitive schools like Colgate and Washington and Lee), and the professors are amazing and focus on each student individually.</p>
<p>Yes, I felt the classes I took at Lehigh in many cases were more demanding than the ones I tookat MIT. In engineering and the sciences at least, Lehigh classes are very demanding by any standard.</p>
<p>I agree that it is a tough school. My son is a freshman in engineering. His workload is extremely heavier than some of his other hs friends who are in engineering in other schools. So...it leads me to wonder. If you study engineering in an engineering school like Lehigh, is it harder (or is it our imagination) than other regular state universities that offer an engineering degree?</p>
<p>The material covered is usually very similar at all schools...in my experience Lehigh tended to give more homework and it had to be better organized. At MIT, as a teaching assistant, I graded lots of sloppy, poorly-prepared papers that at Lehigh would have been out-right rejected. My son now attends the Univ of Florida with a double major in EE and Math, and I would say it is pretty demanding also. It is hard to generalize, of course, but I'd say Lehigh is about as difficult as they come....they are very serious about preparing students for what it takes to be sucessful in a professional career....which is more than just understanding the material.</p>