Presbyterian is a good school but not on the level of either Davidson or Furman. Within the state, it is considered behind both Furman and Wofford for Liberal Arts. It has a great pre-pharmacy program but across the board, Furman is much more rigorous in all areas.
US News ranks over 170 “national” LACs (https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges). Few if any of them are likely to have the same nationwide name-recognition as a big state university or some of the Ivies. In many cases, name-recognition may depend on the kind of person you’re asking or where they live.
One could use a tool like GoogleTrends to compare interest over time in a specific LAC to interest in, say, Harvard University … or Swarthmore. For example, for the past 12 months, the GoogleTrends interest ratio for CentreCollege:HarvardUniversity has been 36:87. The interest ratio for DeepSprings:Swarthmore in the past 12 months in India has been 10:26; worldwide, it was 11:70. So we could say that Deep Springs College has enjoyed only 157 milliSwarthmore’s of global interest. In contrast, Whitman College has attracted 900 milliSwarthmore’s of global interest.
However, the latter ratio doesn’t necessarily mean Swarthmore is better “known” in India than Deep Springs College. A college name might be very familiar to a specific population, yet generate few Google searches. Conversely, a previously little-known college might suddenly generate many searches after a big news story appears about an event unrelated to academics.
As for comparing college rigor, assessment reports by the National Survey of Student Engagement do cover features such as the frequency/amount of writing assignments (http://nsse.indiana.edu/). If you have a specific school in mind, you may be able to find an NSSE report on line (if one has been completed). However, I don’t think a multi-college ranking exists based on composite NSSE scores for “engagement” (or for rigor).
Examples of NSSE assessment reports:
https://wp.stolaf.edu/ir-e/nsse-spring-2015-results-and-reports/
https://www.centre.edu/connect/institutional-research/nsse-report/
http://www.kenyon.edu/directories/offices-services/institutional-research/surveys/student-surveys-and-results/
http://www.earlham.edu/media/2420497/NSSE15%20Frequencies.pdf
The responses to question 7 show the mean number of pages of student writing assigned for the reference year by these LACs:
51 pages … St. Olaf College (for surveyed freshmen; for seniors, the number jumps to 86.3)
53.7 pages … Centre College
56.8 pages … Kenyon College
58.5 pages … Earlham College
Do these results suggest Earlham > Kenyon > Centre > St. Olaf with respect to writing assignment “rigor”? Hmm. Maybe. Is this a good proxy for overall rigor? Hard to say. Absent more data like this, rigorously analyzed, I’d expect many people to assume that the most selective (or highest ranked) colleges tend to be the most rigorous. Information on admission selectivity is widely available. However, there may be more variation in rigor among courses/professors/majors within the same college than there is between “average rigor” (if one could measure it) of any 2 colleges.
For “depth and speed of the program”, I don’t think any cross-major database exists to tell you, for example, that College X covers […detailed content specification …] in N weeks. For Computer Science, the ACM does something close to that for a few colleges in its detailed curriculum guidelines (http://www.acm.org/education/CS2013-final-report.pdf)
There may be quite a few rigorous small liberal arts colleges you have never heard of, but I think the phrasing of the question is problematic.
[QUOTE=""]
I keep hearing about unknown, but rigorous small liberal arts colleges, but colleges that are known for heavy workload like Swarthmore, Reed, Bowdoin are all highly ranked top LACs. What are some really unknown LACs that are rigorous, on par with colleges listed above? <<
[/QUOTE]
If a school “on a par” with Swarthmore, Reed and Bowdoin (all very different schools, BTW), it’s not going to be “really unknown.”
Also rigor will vary widely amongst classes. Choosing a school for overall rigor is no guarantee of the rigor of your own program, and you could certainly put together a rigorous program at many different schools.
Rigor is a difficult thing to quantify. The College of Wooster’s mandatory year-long independent study project is extremely rigorous, yet Wooster is seldom ranked with Swarthmore or Williams.
Colleges like Wooster, Denison, Beloit and Sewanee have many students that are academically on par with those at the very top colleges. But they also accept a range of students whose strengths may lie elsewhere than top academics. They accept promising students who, perhaps, have not taken Calculus. By senior year in college they are ready to tackle an I.S. project, but they required and benefited from a little more nurturing along the way. I was one of those students.
Some really smart students can glide through one of the top colleges and not necessarily get a whole lot out of it. Some less stellar students can thrive at a lesser-ranked, but excellent, LAC and become a CEO, an award-winning professor, or an admired social worker. Ultimately, it is not as much where you go as it is what you make of it.