<p>In an annual survey collected by the Department of Education, U.S. colleges are asked to list a "comparison group" of similar institutions against which to compare their finances, enrollment, and admissions. The Chronicle of Higher Ed. then recently put together a "peer ranking" of 1595 4-year colleges in the U.S. based on this data that's pretty interesting. It's essentially a self-ranking of reputation using U.S. news style metrics:</p>
<p>Unlike U.S. News, colleges and universities are mixed. While some of the top ranked schools aren't surprising (Princeton first for universities), many are. Thoughts?
1. Carleton College
2. Princeton University
3. Oberlin College
4. Stanford University
5. Yale University</p>
<p>Say what you want about U.S. News, but at least it tends to reflect the perceptions of the general populace. This ranking, like many other attempts to come up with a better system than U.S. News, does not.</p>
<p>Unless you consider certain high school counselors of mostly competitive high schools to be part of the general populace (which is actually debatable), US News hardly represents the opinion of the average Joe…</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Some colleges (e.g. UCLA and Berkeley) didn’t even respond to the survey, so they didn’t select any colleges.</p></li>
<li><p>Schools like the ivy league tended to only rate other ivy league schools as their peers.</p></li>
<li><p>Many private universities named no public universities as their peers (Sup USC.)</p></li>
</ol>