There are some schools that have developed strong community partnerships and have very extensive internship programs. Connecticut College gives students financial incentives to work with its career center from the first semester. Mount Holyoke has programs that are equivalent to minors, but they combine academic work with field work and internships. A lot of schools have service learning or other experiential learning programs. So, no, they don’t hand you jobs on the way out the door, but students have a lot of support in finding postgrad employment.
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Bingo!
I have been a college professor for nearly 25 years now, and along the way have worked at three very different colleges (one highly selective university, one moderately selective huge public university with a national reach, and an underfunded open-access regional public), plus my student experience at the three very different institutions my degrees are from (an Ivy, a state flagship, and a community college). So yeah, no LACs, but I’ve got a wide range of experience otherwise.
So I feel like I have a solid foundation on which to say the following: Trying to rate colleges comparatively by rigor is a fool’s game.
That’s because the academic experience is going to vary widely not between colleges, and not even between majors, and not between professors or even classes—the academic experience differs by student.
It is possible for a smart student to skate by without putting in much effort at any college in existence. (Yes, even at the one you’re thinking of with a reputation for rigor.) That’s part of the design—and it’s reasonable to debate whether it’s a flaw in the design, but there we are. Further, a student who isn’t nearly as smart but is willing to put in the work can pass their college classes without really taking it seriously. Of course, some things will be easier or harder for individual students depending on their skillsets—some students have legitimate issues understanding the concept of mathematical integration, some students have real trouble writing their way out of a wet paper bag, some students can’t produce a balanced illustration with any degree of ease whatsoever—but on the whole, if you fulfill the requirements you’re given, you do fine gradewise.
But some students—and they exist in all colleges of all sorts, and they’re not really all that much more common at one college than at another—take on what they’re faced with and do what they can to really engage with the opportunities to learn that they’re given. And yeah, those students are where you’ll find rigor, not the classes they’re taking or the colleges they’re attending.
My job as a professor is not to be rigorous, it’s to provide my students opportunities to experience rigor.
And a postscript of sorts: One of the ways that things like the USNWR rankings do a severe disservice to students and their families is to make us think that the most important factor is the college, not the student. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that it has the potential to destroy higher education, if that viewpoint takes hold more deeply.
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It depends. If you take a course with June Huh in the area in which he just received a fields medal, the course will be rigorous. Some undergrads do it. If you take CS at CMU SCS, the major is inherently rigorous. I would suspect most majors at Caltech will be rigorous. On the other hand, CS at Princeton doesn’t need to be rigorous. There are various less and more rigorous paths available through the major for kids with various levels of preparation. Because the department wants to make this major available to kids that have not had the opportunity to be sufficiently prepared before they come in – kids from under-resourced or under-encouraged demographics. Economics at Harvard does not need to be rigorous, and so on. We say that a major at a university is likely rigorous if it has a high floor of what is expected. So the Russian and Slavic studies major at Princeton is rigorous – you have little choice on the minimum load, and you will have minimum weekly reading load in Russian or Slavic languages. So Chemical and Biological Engg is likely to be more rigorous than CS at Princeton as they let the kid get away with less courses that are non rigorous. It is a more tightly scripted major. When I say that a distributed systems course at Princeton is rigorous, I mean they have weekly assigned reading of literature in the field. This is likely not the case at Purdue – so the Purdue course is likely less rigorous. Obviously any kid can make any course/major rigorous by self-studying. But everything is not in the kid’s hands. If you take a functional programming course with Andrew Appel, and treat it non-rigorously, you will explicitly fail. It is not some loosey goosey thing that the kid can decide which way he wants to go.
If you want rigorous courses, take the younger professors.
This is not necessarily true :-). The older professors can be equally rigorous. And we may remember the organic chemistry brouhaha at NYU where the younger professors set easier exams and grade more leniently.
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I’m a full professor, and many of my students tell me my classes are the hardest they’ve ever taken. Not because I demand that they memorize minute details (I’m a history professor), but because I push them to write and think with precision.
So … no.
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I agree that student factors are very important, but the school and majors matter too. I went to an LAC known for rigorous Biology and Chemistry programs. Despite being a nurturing environment, some students did not meet standards and were failed.
Once I got to medical school, I heard some classmates complain that many of the classes (biochem, genetics etc) seemed totally new, like nothing they had ever seen before even though they had successfully completed courses by those same names at their undergrad institutions. They had trouble keeping up.
But for me and the other student from my college, the classes were largely review. Because of our rigorous preparation, medical school was academically easy for us. Sure it was difficult emotionally and sometimes physically (because of sleep deprivation during hospital rotations) but is was always academically easy.
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Like others, I think rigor can have so many factors. It can be in how you handle it. Is there support if you need it? Are you prepared? One thing, for my family, that was important was not being taught by a TA. We preferred classes taught by professors & eliminated larger, research schools pretty quickly. All of the small colleges we looked into had their classes being taught by professors. If they had TAs, they were indeed the assistants - like in labs helping out. I was first in my very large extended family to go to college (knew nothing about the process & did it pretty blindly). I ended up at UT Knoxville. Great school but I didn’t want the same experience for our 3. My husband was from an educated family, excelled at UT and grad school at UVA. He actually WAS a TA at UVA . A great school too but I think I twitched when he reminisced about feeling uncertain about teaching certain classes not quite in his area. He was told - don’t worry, just read & stay a chapter ahead & you’ll be fine. So many factors to determine rigor.
I can’t speak to math/physics/engin/CS but I agree with fifty’s assessment of biomedical sciences: it’s all about exposure and repetition. In an undergrad course, the rigor may stem from the amount of memorization and/or the ability to apply concepts that are pretty straightforward once you’re familiar with them. When it’s “the second time around”, mostly people get better at both the memory part and the application part (say, interpreting a set of graphs or a gel pattern or a different kind of experimental result). For some of us, due to our undergrad institution and choice of major, med school was often the third time around for topics in biochem, genetics, physiology…plus research experience made the topics even more familiar to us. So med school was easy. Others would have called med school very rigorous. Same classes, same teachers, same tests.
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It’s funny that you say this because just before reading your post, I happened to be reading a reddit thread where a bunch of students who recently graduated from UCB in CS were bemoaning this exact thing. Several posters were saying how when they were students, they did their best to skate through the classes with as little effort as possible, and escaped without having to learn very much. Now that they are working, they feel more interested in the topics, realize the practical value, and wish they had paid more attention.
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How rigorous a class is and how hard a class is are two different things. Rigor is absolute. In a rigorous class, every assertion/conclusion must be convincingly demonstrated with all the assumptions that lead to the conclusion enumerated. A hard class, on the other hand, is relative. It’s relative to the students who attend the class. What is considered a hard class at one college could be an easy class at another.
Actually down to the student level at the same college.
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I’m assuming students who attend a hard class at a college are self-selected. That’s obviously not the case with required courses that all students must take, but those courses are generally not “hard” at most colleges (with a few exceptions, of course).
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Sometimes the hardest class also has the best teacher and is worth taking 
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I agree with everything you say, minus the memorization part. My biology and chemistry classes were experiment-based/problem-based and usually open-book. Really I don’t remember any of my undergrad education involving memorization with the exception of a couple English classes where we were required to memorize poems with the promise that they would enrich our lives years later (which has turned out to be true.)
I have thrown up my hands at this question. My kid, a humanities major, has no solid way to gauge the rigor or academic worth of the 10 schools he’s accepted to. USN ain’t it. Outcomes don’t help much - statistically insignificant numbers of students, and no clear path to judge success, because … humanities…
He’s actually downloading the academic research papers of professors and reading them, to see if he likes their work. Besides that, and Rate My Professor, I’m out of ideas.
Not in college, but in HS, one of my kids was saddled with a pathetic teacher in a language - the only teacher of that language - and her ability to progress was chopped off at the knees, not to mention any chance of a love of learning.
In my kid’s humanities major, the chances of that happening are not insignificant. Sigh.
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Do you know anyone in the field of interest who could weigh in? For example a professor at a school your student is not considering (especially a professor who supervises grad students?)
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I think I know what you’re saying, re: not having the kind of memorization in undergrad that we had with med school (diseases, anatomy, etc). But I do remember specific expectations in a subset of undergrad courses (Krebs cycle intermediates, all 20 amino acids by side chain, etc.) I agree that the tests weren’t asking to regurgitate those facts, but if they were salient to the answer we needed to know them (no open book). This was a loooong time ago. But I also think that generally, it was harder for kids with less straight-up recall ability to work through the answers to even the most “applied” of biochemistry and genetics problems.
One of my son’s hardest classes in college is open book, open internet, and you can ask anyone.
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If I may ask, what is the major, and what are some examples schools?
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