WORK HARD, PLAY HARD: The 20 Most Intense Colleges In America

College is about balance - yes, it's important to take your classes seriously, but it's equally as necessary to cut loose and have fun during your undergraduate years.

Business Insider has created a list of schools that best embody this dual principle - the "work hard, play hard" mentality that many students look for. We found that there was no typical "work hard, play hard" school, and everything from liberal arts colleges to Ivy League universities to large state schools are represented in the following ranking.

To compile this list, we used data from Niche, looking at its rankings of the best party schools and schools with the best academics, smartest students, best Greek life. Niche's college section - College Prowler - features close to 1 million in-depth student reviews on more than 8,000 schools.

We've included a few quotes from each school's Niche profile in our ranking to help illustrate what the student body is like.