WOW, really interesting data about peer colleges

College Search & Lists
1

<p>Have you seen this?
THE ACTUAL prestige rankings, done by universities of universities.
Some surprising results. </p>

<p>[Who</a> Does Your College Think Its Peers Are? | Networks](<a href=“http://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2012/10/02/who-does-your-college-think-its-peers-are/]Who”>Who Does Your College Think Its Peers Are? : Networks Course blog for INFO 2040/CS 2850/Econ 2040/SOC 2090)</p>

<p>when you click on the link below it takes you to this site that shows college’s perceptions of their peers. Harvard only named Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. So cooL!</p>

2

<p>((the link in the article, it’s at the top))</p>

3

<p>Lol @ University of Phoenix, Jersey City selecting:
Dartmouth, Boston College, Brandeis, Cornell and other schools of that caliber as their peers.</p>

4

<p>Amherst claims to have no peers
So do Princeton and Columbia (the only 2 of Yale’s self-selected peers which didn’t select Yale)</p>

5

<p>A&M selected UT as a peer but UT didn’t reciprocate. Ouch. Feels like kinda jerkish of UT, and I plan on going there.</p>

6

<p>Also read the article that goes with it -
[In</a> Selecting Peers for Comparison’s Sake, Colleges Look Upward - Administration - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“In Selecting Peers for Comparison’s Sake, Colleges Look Upward”>In Selecting Peers for Comparison’s Sake, Colleges Look Upward)</p>

<p>Here’s a quote:
"When colleges look to compare themselves with others, they’re not much different from high-school students chasing popularity: Everyone wants to be friends with the Ivy League, but the Ivy League is really picky about whom it hangs out with.</p>

<p>Each year colleges submit “comparison groups” to the U.S. Department of Education to get feedback on how their institution stacks up in terms of finances, enrollment, and other measures tabulated in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. The groups sometimes represent a college’s actual peers but more often reveal their aspirations."</p>

7

<p>thanks classy…fascinating stuff. Took me a while, but below are the top 100 (missing a couple I haven’t ID’d yet). First, here is what the website says about its ranking:

</p>

<p>1 Carleton
2 Princeton
3 Oberlin
4 Stanford
5 Yale
6 Cornell
7 Bowdoin
8 Amherst
9 Williams
10 Swarthmore
11 Middlebury
12 Michigan
13 Pomona
14 Penn
15 Brown
16 Harvard
17 Wesleyan
18 Columbia
19 MIT
20 Illinois
21 Wisconsin
22 Haverford
23 Dartmouth
24 Davidson
25 Hamilton
26 Chicago
27 Grinnell
28 Ohio St
29 Kenyon
30 UCLA
31 UNC
32 Northwestern
33 UC Berkeley
34 Minn
35 Trinity
36 Colgate
37 JHU
38 Penn St
39 U Texas
40 Bates
41 Duke
42 Macalester
43 Vassar
44 Indiana
45 Conn Col
46 Col Col
47 CMU
48 Iowa
49 Smith
50 Florida
51 Mich State
52 U Washington
53 Wash U
54 Tx A&M
55 Villanova
56 Purdue
57 Wellesley
58 W&L
59 NYU
60 Colby
61 Wooster
62 Denison
63 Georgetown
64 Emory
65 Pitt
66 UVA
67 Arizona
68 F&M
69 Sewanee
70 Cal Tech
71 USC
72 Occidental
73 Dickinson
74 Bucknell
75 Valparaiso
76 UMCP
77 Reed
78 Rice
79 U Colorado
80 Ga Tech
81 Iowa St
82 Missouri
83 U Rochester
84<br>
85 Nebraska
86 Elon
87 UCSD
88 Boston C
89 Depauw
90 Drake
91 Whitman
92<br>
93 Centre
94 Rhodes
95 Gettysburg
96 Lafayette
97 Vanderbilt
98 Louisville
99 Beloit
100 Furman</p>

8

<p>Has anyone seen this before? I was really surprised that I haven’t seen it referenced on college confidential before</p>

9

<p>Carleton must be the most approachable of the Popular Girls, or something like that.</p>

<p>I’d never seen this before. Some people might consider this approach useful for finding “more like this” once they’ve identified a couple schools they like. So it might steer someone fixated on one narrow set of options (like the Ivies or the New England LACs) to similar options a little outside their box.</p>

<p>However, it does seem some colleges are more discerning than others in naming their peers. Williams College only lists 10 other small, selective schools (9 other LACs plus Dartmouth). Regent University lists 35 schools including Houston Baptist University and Liberty U. … as well as Harvard, Notre Dame, and the USAF Academy.</p>

10

<p>This is fascinating. Thanks for the link, although the algorithm for making the order of the list sounds alot like the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game.</p>

11

<p>I find this information totally useless, just as I do the use of peer evaluations in college surveys generally.</p>

12

<p>I found the article and interactive database interesting and although it sometimes compares apples to oranges, there is probably some value to it for those who do not know a great deal about colleges. I also found it kind of sad who was chosen and who was not chosen by anybody. I wonder if they are suffering from depression? Kind of like the last kid picked when choosing teams or HS all over again…the populars vs. the wannabees. I guess that theme does continue throughout life. (sigh) :{</p>

13

<p>I know! The most interesting part is when a college chooses a peer school that doesn’t reciprocate !</p>

14

<p>If you click where it says “The Chronical of Higher Education” at the top of the study page, you can get to the publication this is from. My D1 has a job working with institutions of higher education, and she sends me a lot of interesting links from it (she sent me this study several weeks ago). You could spend almost as much time following links and reading this publication as on CC. :)</p>

15

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<p>Shows that whoever responded on behalf of The University of Phoenix’s Jersey City campus has a great sense of humor. Leaving out the free-for-all curriculum at Brown University and the most professional Ivy League school at University of Pennsylvania is really distancing the UoP from its true peers. Ah, the irony. </p>

<p>It is indeed fascinating how … the world of higher education seems to attract such utter non-sense when it takes the form of self-reported data and wishful thinking. </p>

<p>In a way, it is not bad. It has really been too long for the Mother Teresa ranking and the Vedder’s Annnual Crap to have to jockey with London and Shangai to produce the most senseless and irrelevant data for the young aspiring college undergraduate.</p>

<p>This latest contribution trumps them all, albeit without pretending to actually being based on anything objective and relevant. </p>

<p>I cannot for People magazine to produce a ranking of schools based on the facebook use of its students in tracking the Oscars or the Super Bowl. And for Apple to release the coolest and most self-absorbed colleges to beat Google’s EduAnalytics by a nose. </p>

<p>The only sad part is that some fool will repeat the outcome of this “research” and to another fool who will believe it.</p>

<p>PS Buried in the article is one of the best explanation why the USNews is still marred by its moronic Peer Assessment. </p>

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<p>Not putting forth much effort is the charitable understatement of the year, safe and except for the occasional effort to rig the surveys.</p>

16

<p>

</p>

<p>They didn’t claim that. What they didn’t do is participate in the survey, which a number of other universities didn’t do either, including many, or all, of the universities in the UC system.</p>

17

<p>Using the data, I sort of made a tier ranking. To start off I made the assumption that Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford were the best universities.</p>

<p>Tier I:
Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford [Assumed]</p>

<p>Tier II:
MIT/Brown/Columbia/Cornell/Dartmouth/Chicago/UPenn (chosen by atleast two schools from Tier I)</p>

<p>Tier III:
Caltech, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Duke, Georgetown, WashU (either selected by one school from Tier I or two schools from Tier II)</p>

<p>Tier IV:
Carnegie Mellon, Rochester, Rice (either selected by one school from Tier II or two schools from Tier III)</p>

<p>Tier V:
Brandeis, Emory, Vanderbilt (selected by atleast two schools from Tier III and atleast two schools from Tier IV)</p>

<p>Others – Notre Dame, RPI, Georgia Tech, Syracuse, USC, NYU, Tulane, Case Western (mentioned atleast twice by any of the above)</p>

<h2>(LACs are not included)</h2>

<p>Conclusion: the following schools are underrated in ranking by prestige: University of Rochester, Georgetown, and Carnegie Mellon,</p>

18

<p>That “research” is so deserving of an appropriate theme song:</p>

<p>[Barney</a> - I Love You - YouTube](<a href=“- YouTube”>- YouTube)</p>

19

<p>Your tier rating looks accurate!</p>

20

<p>Timetodecide - that was a rather interesting way to look at things. Thanks for sharing!</p>