What are Vanderbilt’s peer schools? I’ve heard Duke, Rice, Wash U, and Northwestern floated around, but can’t think of any else
Are you looking for top school in an urban location? Emory, Georgetown, USC, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hoplins, BCm Tufts are a few I can think of. You can also look here to see what schools Vanderbilt considers to be peer institutions: http://www.chronicle.com/interactives/peers-network
Emory, Georgetown, and Hopkins are definitely peers of VU, probably along with lower tier Ivies like Cornell. I think USC, Tufts, and maybe Carnegie are a tier below that and BC is even below the USC-Tufts tier.
It depends on your metric:
The most common U’s for application are: Duke, Harvard, Princeton.
Socially: UVA, Georgetown, Duke, UPENN
Happy Students: Rice, Wash StL, Dart, Stanford
Academics: Any top 25 U plus top 5 lib. art U’s.
City to live: Austin, Boulder, Ann Arbor
Sports: NW, Duke, UVA, USC, ND, Stanford
VU is part of the New Ivy schools that offer great academics and research in an environment that offers a great quality of life and happy students. The New Ivies: Stanford, Duke, VU, NU, Rice, Wash StL, UVA.
You basically made those up…The peers are really what the universities’ administrations regards as peers. Most top privates, especially non-Ivies have pretty happy students and high quality of life. Some just love labeling themselves as such more than others for whatever reason. I have not really seen Duke, Stanford, or WUSTL label itself this way lately via PR. And even if they didn’t, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t. It literally looks like VU and Rice folks intentionally report being happy to PR just for the sake of the ranking. For example, both schools write articles in their school news everytime the ranking comes out. Last year, it was “oh my God, we’re number 2 now”. It is petty and relies on PR’s ability to sample. Grow up. Oklahoma State Students come in at number 3. How many VU, Rice, Emory, WUSTL, etc students would be happy there?
I find that PR rankings typically represent the values of the student bodies more so than the truth. Like if a place gets high or low ratings in an area, it indicates that those are top values at such schools that folks feel strongest about. Some places will get high ratings for quality of life, some will get high ratings for libraries, or laboratory facilities, things like that. The ratings are reflections of what students care about at each school.
So these are who value quality of life among top 25s: https://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings?rankings=best-quality-life
Seems VU, Rice, Emory, and WUSTL are featured.
https://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings?rankings=best-college-dorms
This will show who rates their dorms highly.
There is also a “students who love their college” rating which is a metric of happiness. I mean come on. If one likes to use PR because it favors their school, then use it fairly because it will exclude many of the schools mentioned and include some that may surprise others. It depends upon what the sampled students value that year. And yes, some student bodies don’t change much and values stay fairly consistent.
But it seems those at many New Ivies (especially privates) value quality of life a bit more than others. Kind of sad to see my school not rank things like its libraries and stuff high and instead rank dormitories and things like that. Makes me wonder: “Is that the first thing to come to mind?”
I’m just gonna stick with what the administrations consider as peers because they likely have better data on things they consider important, and some of it does have to do with admissions (mainly applicant not admitted student overlap which can be a dubious nicely controlled metric), but much has to do with various institutional characteristics and information about current students and faculty
Threads like this are why I read CC. And then I’m reminded why I shouldn’t.