I’m sure they exist… which schools have a reputation for having low-ish admit rates, but are not necessarily as challenging/difficult once enrolled?
A handful of elite schools are known for grade inflation. Brown’s probably the most prominent.
The difficulty of college courses and curricula across different colleges may vary less than the difficulty of admission to different colleges*, so many of the most selective colleges could be answers to your question. Note the graduation rate correlation to admission selectivity.
*E.g. is Harvard Math 1a really significantly more difficult than Laney Math 3A?
Lots of elites have grade inflation, if that’s what you mean. The more targeted question is which colleges DON’T have grade inflation – I would argue that’s a smaller set.
I live near Duke and UNC and word on the street is As are easier to come by at the former.
It depends upon individual college, major, course cohort and professor but colleges like Johns Hopkins, CIT, Rice, U Chicago, Berkeley, MIT and CMU are known to have higher academic rigor than Yale, Brown, USC, Duke, Amherst, NYU type schools with more holistic/athletic admissions. Colleges have to balance things for a higher graduation rate.
@Riversider Amherst is pretty rigorous, at least from what I’ve heard. Most top LACs are academically challenging to some extent since classes often demand high levels of participation.
No matter what the school, you have to take the major into account. Electrical Engineering at a school with a 50% admission rate may be more challenging than certain BA majors at elite schools.
@TheBigChef
I am not a humanity-major person but I would think it is mighty hard to be good at English, philosophy, classics, etc.
Rumor has it that the hardest part of IVYs is to get into the door.
Its a funny myth that only STEM majors can be difficult or require higher IQ.
Ask anybody at Yale about Harvard…or Princeton…or
Some STEM majors may find that humanities courses are quite difficult for them.
The common view that STEM majors are “more difficult” probably comes from the following:
- Some STEM majors have large numbers of lab courses, which tend to increase the workload. (Note that some other majors, like visual and performing arts, also have high workload.)
- STEM majors are more likely to have sequenced prerequisites where upper level courses strongly depend on good knowledge of the lower level material. Other majors have some prerequisites of lower level material, but typically less.
- Math-phobia sometimes starts in high school, resulting in some students voluntarily shutting themselves out of STEM majors (and perhaps others like economics and business). On the other hand, students are not allowed to dodge English in high school (or college usually).
- There is slightly more grade inflation in humanities, according to http://www.gradeinflation.com/ .
@makemesmart It really depends on the Ivy. Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, and Dartmouth are all pretty rigorous academically.
Taking Ivy’s out of the equation, what are the reputations on the LACs?
Harvey Mudd, with its extensive core and GE requirements, and minimum math course rigor that is like the honors or upper level math courses at most colleges, probably stands out compared to other LACs in terms of rigor. Some LACs have open or semi-open curricula that allow students to more easily dodge subjects that they are not good at.
In terms of rigor amongst lac’s, I’d say that Swarthmore, Carleton, Reed, Harvey Mudd and Grinnell have reputations for being a bit more academically challenging than the rest. I’m not sure which ones are considered “easier”, though. Most top LAC’s are pretty challenging places to be.
Who knows? Not trying to stall discussion or critique the OP’s question, but these queries tend to lead to people listing their favorite schools and casting doubt on their least favorites. Which schools are not “all that”? Who knows?
I would recommend sitting in on a class at any institution you’re considering, as it can give you a pretty good idea about this and a lot of other academic concerns at a given university
I sat in on an intro CS course at Duke and thought it was surprisingly not-difficult (however, bear in mind that it was one class on one day in one semester)
Of course, the choice of course may matter; an introductory CS course may be covering material that some high school students already know, for example (but there may also be a more advanced introductory CS course offered). Even within a course, if the topic of the day happens to be one that requires no prerequisite knowledge, that may seem easier for a high school student to understand than one which requires prerequisite knowledge (perhaps taught earlier in the course) that a high school student is unlikely to know.
No “top” colleges is ever as good as the reputation it gets. HYP students are not gods on earth, attending the Mt Olympus of colleges. Nor are any of the colleges with single digit acceptance rates better than may colleges with acceptance rates closer to 50%.
The more popular and famous the college, the higher the number of applicants. As these increase and acceptance rates drop, the reputation of the college increases. All colleges provide the exact same hype. A college which becomes popular starts waving around its acceptance rates as proof that their hype is reality.
However, acceptance rates have dropped by half for many colleges in the past five years or so, but although these are all excellent colleges, they haven’t become twice as “good”.
So, you can assume that most colleges with low acceptance rates really aren’t “all that”. However, the flip side is that most colleges with higher acceptance rates are actually excellent. Just because a college accepts 55% of the applicants doesn’t mean that the students there are all failing introductory classes, while attending a college which provides high-school or lower level classes. Most are excellent colleges full of bright, ambitious, and intellectual students, who are attending challenging and interesting classes.
Exactly @Hapworth! Anything, including a college is “all that” in the eyes of the beholder. And what is rigor for one student may be a piece of cake for another.