Least Rigorous Colleges 2011

Workloads at even the best colleges vary widely. Newsweek ranks the schools that will get you a top-notch degree for the least amount of work.

To pick out the least challenging of the nation's top colleges, the schools considered admitted students with an average Critical Reading/Math SAT score of at least 1250. Then taking into account student opinion, quality and quantity of professors (which directly impacts challenge and workload), and drop-out rate. The total score for each school consisted of several components: College Prowler's "Most Manageable Workload" score (40%), student-to-faculty ratio (25%; from the National Center for Education Statistics), and an analysis of student-posted evaluations on RateMyProfessors.com (25%; generated by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, an education think tank).

Additionally, each school's average SAT score was plotted for admitted students against its freshman retention rate (percent of first-years who return the following fall; from NCES) to estimate the degree to which each college's actual retention rate differed from what the correlation would predict. The results were taken as a measure of relative ease or difficulty, and factored this in as 10% of the overall score.

SUNY at Binghamton
University of Florida
University of Wisconsin-Madison
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
University of Maryland-College Park
University of California-San Diego
Northeastern University
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
The College of New Jersey
Pitzer College
American University
SUNY at Geneseo
Gustavus Adolphus College
University of California-Los Angeles
George Washington University
University of Southern California
University of California-Berkeley
Villanova University
University of Pittsburgh
Johns Hopkins University
Trinity College
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Claremont McKenna College
University of Rochester

I'm Ron Denaro and thanks for joining College Campus Chatter today!

Ron Denaro is the president of College Campus Trips, a tour company providing high school students with tours of college campuses, nationwide. For more information, call (954) 567-5751 or e-mail: ron@collegecampustrips.com