I’m just curious if knowledge about this exists. For example, maybe Amherst has an immense amount of rigor and a high workload, but Vanderbilt, while it is a great school, is more manageable (I’m just making this up).
Are all great schools super intense? Or are some harder than others even when they are the same caliber of education?
While I would not say easy, Yale has a reputation as having a cordial academic atmosphere–and if I had to say, some of that is attributed to the residential college system that they employ. That said, whenever you place very bright and motivated people in a single setting, it naturally lends to some level of competition.
Most STEM focused schools will be inherently more difficult because those subjects require more work. Therefore schools like MIT and CMU are rated as more difficult than Harvard or Yale which are not as STEM focused but subject by subject I would presume there is not much difference.
“Most STEM focused schools will be inherently more difficult because those subjects require more work.”
I’m not sure that is true at all, but a lot of people believe it, especially those who are in STEM fields.
I went to a very difficult college, and the math and physics majors I knew there divided into two groups: those who “got” the material easily, and those that didn’t. For the former, their classes were easy, their homework didn’t take much time, they had no papers to write. They just took tests and got things right, or did labs that were almost rote. For the others, of course, it was hard as hell.
On the other side, reading, understanding and writing about Wittgenstein is going to be difficult for anyone. Moby Dick is going to be 1500 pages of dense reading whether you like it or not.
So, I don’t really buy into these blanket claims about STEM being hard and everything else being soft. But some of them surely are.
With that said, by reputation (from what I’ve heard), the hardest top tier schools include UChicago, MIT, Caltech, Columbia, Swarthmore, CMU, Johns Hopkins and Reed.
I won’t talk about the “easist” because I don’t hear that any of them are particularly easy compared to others.
Harvey Mudd has a reputation as a daunting academic challenge.