The data is from 2012, so it is a little dated. It would be interesting to see if anything has changed. Interesting facts:
Princeton believes they have no peers.
Harvard thinks Yale, Stanford, and Princeton are peers.
Check out where UChicago stood in 2012
The thing is, it’s not dated at all. You would pretty much get the same response today.
Short story: Chicago thinks its peers are the Ivy League (except Dartmouth), Stanford, MIT and Cal Tech, and Hopkins, Northwestern, WUStL. Chicago is regarded as a peer by the Ivy League (except that Columbia and Princeton didn’t participate, and Harvard only acknowledges YPS as peers), a more expansive list of regional privates, the top publics, and a bunch of high-level LACs, but not the tech schools or Stanford.
Mostly, the individual answers tell you something about what precise type of a-hole is answering the questionnaire on behalf of a particular institution. Harvard: par for the course. Chicago: pretty accurate, except for forgetting to mention any public universities. University of Phoenix, Jersey City: You go, girl! Of course Columbia is a peer!
You know what tells you exactly how useful this exercise is? Its methodology tells you that Carleton College is the central institution in American higher education. The most colleges that are chosen by the most other colleges as peers name Carleton as a peer. Princeton – which refused to play – is second, followed by Oberlin, Stanford, Yale, and Cornell. Super informative.
What is interesting to me is how little respect UVA gets. Its kind of this little bubble sitting all by itself.
edited: I miss read, I should have said how little respect William and Mary gets.
Or Bowdoin selecting 98 peer universities, including all three University of Michigan locations.
I don’t think Princeton thinks it has no peers, I think Princeton didn’t answer the survey (there were a lot of schools that had 0).
The only thing this would be helpful for is if the school will consider FA offers from peer schools.
Why do you think William and Mary gets little respect? It gets named as a peer by 21 colleges, just not so much by the same colleges it selected. UVa not naming it as a peer – that’s a clear dis. But claiming Princeton, Brown, and Duke as peers? It’s not so surprising they didn’t name W&M as one of their top-10-15 peers (remembering that Princeton didn’t respond at all).
I don’t understand the placement of the individual-college bubbles in space at all. The size of the bubble reflects the rank of the college in their moronic ranking system, but I don’t know what puts a bubble high or low on the vertical or horizontal axes. Horizontal may be size, and vertical stats? I don’t know
I saw this before and, like you, I don’t really know what to make of it. A number of things are going on.I think size of bubble is indicative of the number of peers. I think the horizontal axis placement is based on the types of peers it is identified with. Smaller and private to the left and larger and public to the right. So you get some anomalies like William and Mary being positioned more toward privates despite being public.
Private schools don’t seem to name public schools as peers very often. UVA is not named as a peer by any private school it cited. William and Mary only has a common citation with Wake Forest. Schools like U of Wisconsin only cite public schools. Michigan cites public and private, but like UVA, none of the private schools it cites cite it in return. Bowdoin selects nearly 100 peers! BYU, which is private, selects only public schools as peers.
In a sense, UVA and William and Mary are not peers. UVA is much larger and more research intensive. If you look at selectivity and cross-applications, though, they would be close peers.
UVA cites some strange peers like Catholic U and Iowa State University. William and Mary, with the exception of some large schools like UVA and UNC where there are probably a lot of common applications, chooses smaller schools with some level of undergraduate focus.
The only thing I can get out of this is when the peers go both ways. The rankings mean absolutely nothing. So for UChicago it’s peers (according to this) are:
Brown
Cornell
JHU
WUSTL
Yale
Columbia
CalTech
Northwestern
Penn
I’d agreed that probably the most significant thing is when the peer citations go both ways. Still, it is clear that the schools approached the ask differently.
The size of College A’s bubble reflects its “ranking,” and the ranking is based on the number of colleges that name College A as a peer weighted by the number of other colleges that named those colleges as peers. The basic idea is that you score big if the most popular girl in the class is your friend, but to really score big you need to be a full-blown member of the popular-girl clique. And the winner is . . . Carleton! (Which is a great school, no doubt, but you would be hard pressed to explain why it was the greatest school.)
The bubble size does not reflect when peer citations go both ways. Princeton and Columbia have large bubbles, despite having zero two-way peers (because they didn’t name any peers). I don’t understand why it’s significant when peer citations go both ways, other than to confirm that, yes, everyone is participating in similar groupthink.
But the spatial placement of the different-sized bubbles on the chart is also clearly significant, and that’s not explained anywhere I can find. My best guess is that x-axis = number of students, because the public universities mostly seem to be part of the vaguely phallic mushroom-shaped cluster on the right and the LACs are almost all part of the blobbier mushroom on the left, with the private research universities making up the very phallic center mushroom. The y-axis seems to be some measure of selectivity, since the famous, elite-type schools all seem to show up in the head of whichever mushroom they are part of.
@CU123: I agree that these rankings border on being absurd. How is Caltech a peer of Chicago ? Maybe I misunderstand the use of the word “peer”. To me, Chicago’s peers are Columbia, Yale & Swarthmore. What am I misunderstanding ?
I only copied the schools that considered each other “peers”. So someone at CalTech considered UChicago a peer and vice versa. There certainly departments at both schools that share a lot in common.
The colleges name their own peers. Whoever made the choice at Chicago included Caltech, and whoever made the choice at Caltech included Chicago. Honestly, that’s a lot more persuasive to me than your opinion, @Publisher , even if it were also my opinion, too.
I understand somewhat why you might consider Swarthmore a peer of Chicago, but that requires several leaps of imagination that, as it happened, no one at either institution made. While they compete for some of the same undergraduate students, they are radically different sizes, structures, regions, and neighborhoods. What they have in common with each other, each of them has in common with at least 20-30 other institutions, many of which are much more similar. I do think it makes sense for top research universities to pay attention to what’s happening at top LACs, and vice versa, from the standpoint of pedagogical structure, but for most purposes from the standpoint of administrators the differences between a LAC and a research university are going to swamp any similarities.
Caltech and Chicago both took similar approaches in identifying peers – they looked at most of the Ivies (Caltech was somewhat more selective there) and MIT, and added some other private research universities that are more or less of similar quality. Chicago was somewhat more focused regionally (WUStL and NWU, but also JHU), while Caltech leaned STEMmy (CMU and Rice, but also NYU and, of course, Chicago). Caltech, somewhat hilariously, didn’t notice that it had any potential peers west of the Rockies, not even in Palo Alto. (Rice was its only peer west of the Mississippi.)
In point of fact, Chicago and Caltech have significant academic strengths in common, such as physics and math, and Caltech has relatively small but high quality social science programs that are very compatible with Chicago.
@JHS Thank You !
@JHS UVA did not cite Dartmouth as a peer and that is perhaps the most similar Ivy to William and Mary in size and scope. Dartmouth did not cite UVA either.
Unless my cursory check is wrong, not a single Ivy identified a public peer.
Hardly any of the private research universities I looked at named a public peer, except for a few in the south – Rice, Elon, Wake Forest. Stanford didn’t even name Berkeley, notwithstanding that Stanford has been looking over its shoulder at Berkeley one way or another daily for 125 years. USC didn’t name UCLA. Duke didn’t play, so I don’t know whether it might have named UNC at least. Emory, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Lehigh – didn’t name any public peers. Silly.
By contrast, all of the academically oriented public universities named a mixture of public and private peers.
The only two privates-> public that I saw were CMU who said Gtech was a peer and Syracuse who said both Pitt and Penn St.
I think that the position in the x and y has more to do with who schools matched themselves with so that all the lines are relatively the same length. The dot that supports this is where the College of New Jersey is on the chart who is located in the midst of Private Masters, but all of the peers are either LAC or Public Master and itself is a Public Masters in the middle of Private Master schools.
Personally I don’t think that top public and top privates compare well, they have such different financial dynamics and the publics are usually of a much larger size. You would have to narrow it down to specific departments at the public universities to find comparisons, and I think that this poll was more generalized. There also seemed to be a natural bias to go slightly “up” when naming peers instead of down.
@Publisher BTW, Caltech’s current president was the provost of UChicago prior to being hired by Caltech. On the Caltech student blog, I’ve read about a number of undergraduates visiting UChicago when choosing between various grad school admissions. I would guess that these are primarily physics and math majors.
My son is at Caltech, but UChicago was high on his list because of their strong physics program and their having the kind of course rigor he was looking for.
Those are some of the reasons Caltech and UChicago consider each other peers.
I’ll add my support for Caltech being a peer. My son is a math major at Chicago and Caltech was his other top choice. The schools share a reputation for rigor, excellent prep for math and science graduate work, lack of perceived pretension and an emphasis on the discovery of new knowledge. Approximately 30% of the declared majors at UChicago are math or science, albeit with significant amounts of double majors among them.