I had a friend tell me that Northwestern was on Tufts and Wake Forest’s level. Not to rag on these, but I thought Northwestern was markedly higher than these colleges. I was under the impression that northwestern was peer schools with Duke, upenn, vanderbilt, dartmouth, washu and others
So, what are northwestern’s peer schools actually?
Colleges identify peer institutions all the time. Although it dates to 2012, the following website allows you to see which colleges think are their peers.
http://www.chronicle.com/interactives/peers-network
Northwestern choose the following schools as peers .
Brandeis U
Brown U
California Inst of Tech
Carnegie Mellon U
Case Western Reserve U
Columbia U
Cornell U
Duke U
Emory U
Harvard U
Johns Hopkins U
Massachusetts Inst of Tech
New York U
Princeton U
Rice U
Stanford U
Syracuse U
Tulane U
U of Chicago
U of Pennsylvania
U of Rochester
U of Southern California
Vanderbilt U
Washington U in St. Louis
Yale U
The following schools choose Northwestern as a peer:
Boston C
Boston U
Bowdoin C
Brandeis U
Brown U
Carnegie Mellon U
Dartmouth C
Emory U
Fordham U
George Washington U
Georgetown U
Georgia Inst of Tech
Johns Hopkins U
Lehigh U
Michigan State U
New York U
Nova Southeastern U
Pepperdine U
Polytechnic Inst of New York U
Tufts U
U of Chicago
U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
U of Michigan, Ann Arbor
U of Notre Dame
U of Phoenix - West Michigan Campus
U of Phoenix-Michigan Campus
U of Rochester
U of Southern California
U of Virginia
Vanderbilt U
Washington U in St. Louis
Wellesley C
The overlaps are as follows:
Brandeis U
Brown U
Carnegie Mellon U
Emory U
Johns Hopkins U
New York U
U of Chicago
U of Rochester
U of Southern California
Vanderbilt U
Washington U in St. Louis
To answer your questions, Wake Forest most definitely is not NU’s peer, and Tufts likely is not as well.
You can google USNWR rankings to see what schools are listed around Northwestern.
This is kind of a silly exercise. There is no standard definition of “peer.” Just look at objective factors like size, selectivity etc. and you will get an approximate answer, which is many people would view Northwestern and Tufts as being on par with each other while I’m sure many would not.
Historically – should this aspect be of interest to you – Northwestern and Tufts, as well as Penn and Duke, shared statistical attributes. Vanderbilt would not appear to have competed academically with this group:
In my own ranking structure, Northwestern is ahead of Tufts. US News and most other college ranking services agree. It is hard to find reliable undergraduate academic program rankings, but if you look at grad school rankings, Northwestern is among the very top schools overall. While you can probably say that an undergrad program can still be good if its grad program isn’t, you can also say that a highly ranked grad program likely points to a quality undergrad program.
The schools have different strengths, and both provide a strong undergrad experience, but if it’s academic rep you’re asking about, I think there’s a clear victor here.
…but i think the schools are probably close enough in quality that you should choose between them based on fit variables like academics (curriculum, majors, class sizes, grad requirements, etc.), cost, environment and social vibe.
I think they are peers in terms of selectivity and caliber of the student body. But Northwerstern has the range that Tufts doesn’t have - Northwestern has top-5, top-10, and top-20 programs across many disciplines.
@zinhead -
Go to your link,
Click on the arrow in the search box that contains “all colleges”
From the pull-down menu select “AAU”
Note the list of AAU colleges appears on the right hand side of the screen
Compare the list of colleges with blue dots in front of them with Northwestern’s list of “peers”
What was the result?
@Mastadon - NU picked all of the other private AAU schools as peers. This is a common method of selecting peers, for both for AAU and non-AAU schools.
The graphics are revealing what the aspirational goals are for various schools. If you do the same exercise for Notre Dame, you will note that ND picked the same AAU peer set at NU (with the exception of Syracuse). This is keeping with ND’s desire to be known as the “Catholic Research University”.
However, with the exception of Rice, none of the AAU schools peered with ND. The schools that choose ND as a peer mostly had a religious affiliation, while ND did not see any other religiously affiliated schools as peers including other Catholic schools.
I find it strange that Northwestern does not include Michigan, UIUC and Wisconsin as peers as well. Those schools have far more in common with NU than Brandeis, Caltech, Syracuse and Tulane.
It appears that NU only lists private schools in its peer selections. Why it does that, I have no idea.
Of course. In fact, the question should be is Tufts on Northwestern’s level.
Lol, Princeton doesn’t consider itself to have peers.
@rjkofnovi, probably because NU is a private school.
How many Ivies/equivalents list any public as a peer?
@Alexandre, maybe you consider it strange, but Stanford also lists Dartmouth as a peer but not Cal even though you could argue they have greater similarities to Cal than to Dartmouth.
I agree PurpleTitan. Those peer lists aren’t very telling. For some reason, Bowdoin College and BYU both list Michigan has a peer school! LOL! Oh well, yet another useless resource that students should ignore.
But the Ivies list very few universities as peers, so it is understandable that they do not include public universities. Princeton and Columbia lists none. Harvard just 3. Cornell, Penn Yale list each 10 (the other 7 Ivies and 3 non-Ivies-Chicago, MIT and Stanford) and Brown and Dartmouth list 17 each.
The only Ivy League that should have included public universities in its list is Cornell. Heck, one of Cornell’s 2 founders was a professor at Michigan, and 7 of Cornell’s 14 professors were either faculty at Michigan or alumni of Michigan.
But NU lists 25 universities, and as Big 10 schools with similar offerings and campus cultures, I think it makes little sense to leave our Michigan, UIUC and Wisconsin, even if they are public.
That being said, you are definitely on to something. Private universities seem reluctant to list public universities among their peers. For example, Duke does not even list UNC or UVa as peers. I think there is a negative stigma attached to public institution in the US, but that’s a topic for another time! 
To be honest, universities should not list more than 10-20 universities as true peers. For example, in the case of NU, the object of this thread, I would include Brown, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Harvard, JHU, Michigan, MIT, Penn, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, UIUC, UVA, Vanderbilt, Wisconsin, WUSTL and Yale. Some of those are closer peers than others.
@jaecha Of the three you listed, Wake Forest is the outlier. Northwestern and Tufts are both highly competitive schools. Wake Forest is in line with Union and Skidmore.
@Alexandre, well, there is a pretty big size difference (in undergrad student bodies) between any of the Ivies/equivalents (besides Cornell and UPenn) and giant publics like UMich/UW-Madison/UIUC. Granted, in size, Cornell and UPenn are similar to smaller public flagships like UVa/UNC.
PurpleTitan, are we talking about size or are we talking about peers? Not the same at all. Size is a fairly tangible concept, but irrelevant to the topic at hand. After all, NU did list Dartmouth, Rice and Brandeis as peers and all three are far smaller than NU. In terms of quality, campus culture and feel, some of those schools (perhaps not Brandeis, but the others anyway) certainly are peers, but not in terms of size. It also listed Columbia, NYU and USC, all three of which enrolled 30,000-45,000 students. As such, I am not sure NU had size in mind when it listed its peers.
To me, peers refers to campus culture, academic quality, institutional feel, etc…Cornell and Michigan are peers. I am an alumnus of both, so I know. The difference between them is anywhere from completely insignificant to nonexistent. I am not as familiar with NU, but I think they share much in common…on parer anyway. Let us not make Cornell and NU out to be LACs. They both enroll 20,000+ students and they both emphasize research.
I guess it depends on one’s personal prejudices. If someone who is interested in NU asked me to list peer schools, Michigan would definitely be on the list, while Brandeis, NYU, Rice, Syracuse and Tulane would probably not.
@Alexandre, I think you need to differentiate between grad and undergrad. Especially since, in NU’s case, the med and law schools and PT MBA program aren’t on the Evanston campus while FT Kellogg, while in Evanston, mostly keep to themselves.