The Daily Beast has the answer. The popular news website, the brainchild of former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, just released its ranking of the 50 most stressful colleges in the US. Lo and behold, Harvard is ranked #5, only trailing after Stanford, Columbia, MIT and Penn.

(Image courtesy of Google Images)

The five criteria taken into consideration are (excerpts from the actual article):

• The cost: Financial pressure is a huge stress-inducer. Tuition plus room and board, weighted at 35 percent. With 2009-2010 data from the National Center on Education Statistics.

• Competitiveness: How academically rigorous is the school? Weighted at 35 percent, with 2010 data from US News & World Report.

• Acceptance rate: More competitive schools generally produce a more competitive student body. Weighted at 10 percent, with 2010 data from US News & World Report.

• Engineering: Is the school known for its particularly rigorous graduate engineering program? Weighted at 10 percent, with 2010 data from US News & World Report.

• Crime on campus: Adapted from The Daily Beast’s analysis of college crime, weighted at 10 percent and ranked relative to this particular group of colleges. With data from the US Department of Education.

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Hello, world.

Sure, Harvard’s still working on picking its broke ass off the floor, but as a cutting-edge research university, some expectations that it’ll keep updating according to the internet’s modern standards remain despite a total endowment fail. But after browsing through some webpages affiliated with FAS, we… well, we really wish we hadn’t. Luckily, Noice did all the dirty work to save all the Harvard kiddies some cyber-aesthetic pain.

THE BEST

School of Engineering and Applied Sciences: This one’s a no-brainer, what with all the hackers that the SEAS has on demand. With an exhaustive menu on the homepage, the site lets any idiot find anything, anywhere from research opportunities for undergraduate research as well as a complete census of the school’s demographics (74% male–again, no surprise there). Take a peek at the course website of CS50, maybe the only undergraduate class that doesn’t use a crappy my.harvard iSite (and also the only course page that embedded an LOLcat applet last year).

Anthropology: Links to sweet interviews with awesome faculty! Cool header! Sans serif font! Very noice indeed.

Literature: Shocker, right? But entering the Lit site proves to be a candied orgasm for the eyes with rainbow books as the background (gay pride, anyone?). Not only that, the department proves it’s not just about lofty and obscure theory and academia, as shown by its extremely functional, minimalist menu on the bottom, linking visitors to the department’s degree requirements easily and its Ph.D. dissertations pompously. But after seeing the quality of the site, we’ll forgive them.

See the sites for sore eyes after the jump.

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