Ranking Colleges By Stress Level

College stress has many origins, ranging from your roommate not believing in deodorant, being able to simultaneously touch all four walls in your dorm room to academic rigor.

However, an article in The Daily Beast presented a formula to rank the top 50 most stressful colleges in America. Its formula declared cost and competitiveness as the leading factors of stress.

Cost (tuition plus room and board) can create stress before, during and after college for many students. Students at more expensive universities are more likely to take on part time jobs and/or student loans. Both of which can create tremendous amounts of stress. The stress of student loans can linger for years after college graduation.

Competitiveness is how academically challenging the university is. Students at more difficult colleges are likely to spend long hours locked up in libraries, staring at textbooks. Also, the average GPAs at harder colleges are likely to be lower, creating stress.

The Daily Beast also considered three smaller factors: acceptance rate, graduate engineering program and on-campus crime rates. A low acceptance rate can create strong competition among students and give students the mindset that they need to constantly outperform their peers. Graduate engineering programs are very popular programs, and they are incredibly challenging. High on-campus crime rates can also create a lot of worrying and stress for students.

College stress will happen no matter where you decide to go to college. If you already know you do not handle stress well, and it deeply affects your life, then a less-stressful college might be a better option.

50 most "stressful" colleges
1) Stanford

2) Columbia

3) Massachusetts Institute of Technology

4) University of Pennsylvania

5) Harvard

6) Princeton

7) Vanderbilt

8) Carnegie Mellon

9) California Institute of Technology

10) Northwestern

11) University of Chicago

12) Yale

13) Washington University in St. Louis

14) Dartmouth

15) Johns Hopkins

16) Duke

17) Cornell

18) University of Southern California

19) Georgetown