Which are the Happiest Colleges and Universities Around the World?

University can be a life-changing experience, from learning the skills needed to secure your dream job to making life-long friends.

From the friends made and knowledge gained to all those late nights spent playing beer pong, if you went to college, chances are you made some happy memories during your time as a student.

But at which universities will you make the most joyful memories?

With 59% of those aged 18 to 29 on Instagram, Resume.io figured the beloved photo app offered a unique glimpse into just how happy university students are.

So analysts at Resume.io used an AI emotion recognition tool to analyze thousands of Instagram photos geo-tagged at different universities across the U.S., Australia and the UK to find out which schools are home to the happiest students.

How Was This Study Conducted?

The team of data analysts at Resume.io started by manually curating a list of Instagram location pages for the top universities in the U.S., Australia and the UK. Just to give you a better idea, it was a list of Instagram location pages such as this one for Princeton University. These pages compile all the Instagram posts geotagged for that specific location.

The data analysts then collected as many available images as possible before cleaning up the list by removing duplicates and anonimizing the data. The last step was to run the images through an AI emotion recognition tool called Amazon Rekognition API to scan faces and calculate various metrics regarding facial expressions.

The Resume.io team focused on the ‘happiness’ metric, i.e., how likely a face is to be expressing happiness. For the purposes of the study, data analysts considered a face to be happy if its happiness score was given as equal to or greater than 75%.

With all this data in hand, Resume.io proceeded to rank universities in each country by the proportion of happy faces appearing in Instagram photos tagged there.

Findings

Below you’ll find the top 20 happiest colleges in each country according to Resume.io.

To find out more about this study, click here.

SEE ALSO: Schools vs. Smog: How Clean is the Air at Your College?