Academic Challenge

Academic difficulty of any school is often determined by acceptance rate or a different simple measure. However, these statistics can be skewed by countless different factors, so we decided to make this ranking category much more straightforward. These Liberal Arts schools with the most challenging academics have been determined solely by current students.

We used student responses from our annual Liberal Arts Colleges Student Survey to determine the top 20 colleges on this list. Each ranking is a combination of the number of hours students study at the school and the perceived difficulty of the academic workload.

Because the perceived difficulty of academic workload is a much more subjective measure than the number of study hours, we’ve also factored in the colleges’ average SAT scores (critical reading + math). Students at highly selective colleges tend to have expectations of a more difficult academic workload when they enter college, while students at less selective schools would not expect as much of a challenge, which is why we’ve included this measure.

Schools with the Most Challenging Academics

Ranking		School	State
1		Davidson College	NC
2		Grinnell College	IA
3		Carleton College	MN
4		Colorado College	CO
5		Bryn Mawr College	PA
6		Macalester College	MN
7		Mount Holyoke College	MA
8		Hamilton College	NY
9		Smith College	MA
10		Claremont McKenna College	CA
11		Kenyon College	OH
12		Furman University	SC
13		Rhodes College	TN
14		Occidental College	CA
15		Colby College	ME
16		Oberlin College	OH
17		Centre College	KY
18		Franklin and Marshall College	PA
19		Lawrence University	WI
20		Barnard College	NY