Some colleges earn a reputation for being “party schools” and many — often a handful of those same institutions — get attention for their athletic records.
Other schools are better known for their academic rigor. High schoolers know it can take a lot of extra study hours to get into their dream colleges, but at some institutions, the hard work really starts after you’re admitted.
At Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, for example, students spend much of their free time hitting the books or working on projects, making the Needham, Massachusetts-based school the college where students study the most, according to The Princeton Review.
The publication takes schools from its annual list of Best Colleges and ranks them on different metrics based on student surveys. Its ranking of schools where students study the most is based on the results of a survey asking students how many hours outside of class they spend studying each day.
Here are the 10 most studious colleges for 2025, according to The Princeton Review:
- Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering — Needham, Massachusetts
- Lehigh University — Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Cambridge, Massachusetts
- California Institute of Technology — Pasadena, California
- College of the Atlantic — Bar Harbor, Maine
- Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology — Terre Haute, Indiana
- Gettysburg College — Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
- Williams College — Williamstown, Massachusetts
- Reed College — Portland, Oregon
- Grinnell College — Grinnell, Iowa
It may not be surprising to Olin College students that their school topped the list.
The school offers an engineering-focused curriculum, but with a liberal arts-inspired approach. It aims to combine “technical and engineering education with a strong emphasis on the arts, humanities, social sciences, and entrepreneurship to prepare students for the challenges they will face as engineers in the real world,” according to the school’s website.
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Classes at Olin are mostly project-based and, despite all those study hours, students report taking very few tests, per Princeton Review’s surveys.
Since students mostly graduate from Olin with engineering degrees, their earnings outcomes are on the higher end. Median earnings for students 10 years after attending is $129,455, according to the Department of Education’s College Scorecard.
Notably, most of the schools where students report the most study hours are similarly science, technology, engineering and math-focused. That’s not to say students in the humanities, art or other fields don’t work as hard — majors in the social sciences and humanities are more popular at both Williams and Reed — but perhaps have less hands-on and technical work than STEM students.
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