Stanford Tops List of Stressful Schools

Beats Cal by a wide margin

Stanford University is tops a national list where being No. 1 is not a good thing.

The Daily Beast created a formula to measure how relatively stressful a college campus is by combining the cost of the school, the competitiveness of admission, how good the engineering department is and how bad crime is on campus.

It comes during a time when admission letters are hitting mailboxes of student-hopefuls across the country.

"Kids know that stress over which envelope — thick or thin — is only the beginning," the website claims.

The complicated equation put Stanford on top as the most stressful university in the country.  It soundly beat University of California, Berkeley which ranked only 24th.

Five criteria were taken into account:

  • Competitiveness
  • Cost
  • Acceptance rate
  • Engineering
  • Crime on Campus

The Daily Beast suggests that Stanford's plush, bucolic campus on the peninsula stands in stark opposition to the mental state of its students.

A number of UC schools made the top 50, however, including UCLA, Santa Barbara, Davis and Irvine.

Jackson West wasn't exactly stressed out by competitive academics at NYU, number 24, but the expense stress sounds about right.

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