<p>
</p>
<p>Why would you assume they would be so blissfully ignorant about the competition in their own highly competitive industry? Granted, the leaders of major research universities have no reason to pay much attention to LACs (and vice versa), but research universities watch each other like hawks. They’re competing for federal research dollars, for one thing, and they know exactly where they and every other major research university stands in that competition. They’re competing for faculty, both at the entry level and for lateral hires; they know which of their own departments are in good shape relative to the competition, who’s ahead of them, who’s gaining on them, who’s fading, which schools can have them for lunch if they decide to raid their faculty, and which schools they can have for lunch. They’re competing for top graduate students, and they know which of their graduate programs are doing well in that competition and which aren’t, who’s doing better and who’s doing worse. They’re competing for undergraduates and they know which schools regularly beat them in that competition and which don’t. </p>
<p>The leaders of major research universities are frequently asked to serve on accreditation committees for other major research universities. In that capacity they are able to go over the capacities and operations of a major competitor with a fine-tooth comb, examining its strengths and weaknesses in great detail and with brutal candor. Granted, they get to see only a few of their competitors up close like that, but they do so as members of committees whose members have collectively examined dozens of other universities, and so there’s a lot of comparative benchmarking that goes on.</p>
<p>Some of the peer-watching is highly formalized in other ways. For example, our state flagship, the University of Minnesota, regularly compares itself on all sorts of metrics to a self-identified “comparison group” of 10 major public research universities (UC Berkeley, UCLA, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, Texas, U Washington, and Wisconsin), all somewhat stronger than Minnesota in some, many, or all aspects of institutional strength. The U engages in this exercise for the purpose of measuring its own progress in achieving its strategic objectives and to gauge its standing relative to an aspirational group of peer institutions. Its leaders know who’s in that group and what are their greatest strengths and weaknesses; they know which schools didn’t make the cut because they’re not strong enough, and which schools were excluded from the comparison group because they have certain strengths that a public research university can’t expect to match or are just sufficiently different in character that the comparisons wouldn’t make sense.</p>
<p><a href=“https://www.irr.umn.edu/progress/progress2007/UMN_Metrics_Overview_June_2008.pdf[/url]”>https://www.irr.umn.edu/progress/progress2007/UMN_Metrics_Overview_June_2008.pdf</a></p>
<p>It’s a common theme on CC that the leaders of universities can’t possibly know enough about other universities to offer informed opinions about them. That’s silly. It’s a highly competitive business. Of course they know. </p>
<p>Granted, the President and Provost of the University of Minnesota may not know very much about the University of Wyoming, but they know enough to know they don’t need to know more because there’s virtually no area in which the University of Wyoming is a major competitive threat to the University of Minnesota; its faculties are weaker across the board (and if there are any strong ones, I’m confident the President and Provost at Minnesota would have heard about it), its graduate programs are not competitive with Minnesota’s, and it doesn’t draw a strong national student body at the undergrad level. Yet there’s no indication that it’s on the verge of collapse, either. So when the PA survey asks them to grade the University of Wyoming on a scale of 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished), it’s neither going to get a 1 (a score reserved for the truly troubled institutions), nor is it going to get a 4 or 5 (scores reserved for the strongest institutions). They’re going to give it a 2 or a 3. And guess what? When that exercise is repeated by several hundred research university officials, the University of Wyoming comes out with a PA score of 2.6–pretty much just exactly what you’d expect. The truth is, you and I have enough information to engage in that exercise, and people on CC routinely engage in that kind of exercise on a daily basis. So why would you assume university presidents and provosts are less well informed than we are, when it comes to the relative pecking order in the industry they are paid to keep on top of?</p>