Who Does Your College Think Its Peers Are?
http://chronicle.com/article/Peers-Interactive-Data/134262/
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s article entitled “Who Does Your College Think Its Peers Are?” presents an interesting look on how colleges view each other. Almost 1,600 four year colleges were selected to disclose which other colleges they consider peers. For example, Cornell University, an Ivy-league institution in Ithaca, NY, selected the other seven Ivy-league schools as well as a few other selective private institutions. The set of colleges that consider Cornell as peer is much more extensive, they include schools that have strengths in technology like CMU, University of Washington, Virginia Tech, and schools that are close in proximity like Syracuse, NYU, and NYU-Poly. The set of colleges that is the intersection of the set of colleges any college chooses and the colleges that chose that specific college is what the article considers “true peers”. As far as the data shows, set of Cornell’s true peers is slightly smaller than the set of peers it considered.
If we were to think of the peer selection process as a game, with all players thinking rationally, then the resulting graph would look a little different. Let each college c have their own initial prestige p. When a college c selects another c’ as a peer, and if c’ also chooses c, the prestige of c is incremented by the prestige of c’. Otherwise if the two sets of peer choosing are mutually exclusive, we decrement c’s prestige by the prestige of c’. All colleges know each college’s initial prestige level, but are unaware of the colleges they may choose. In order for colleges to maximize their true peers, or maximize their amount of prestige they can have, the dominant strategy is to select the colleges of a similar prestige level as their own; those that boast similar freshman SAT scores and selectivity. This is exactly how the Ivy league schools and well known liberal arts colleges select and maximize their prestige in this example. For lesser known schools, as the article states, they lose credibility by naming elite schools as peer institutions.
http://chronicle.com/article/in-selecting-peers/134228/
-Anon