Peers - Which Universities Do You Think Are Lamar's Peers

[LUSportsFan]

I had a little time to kill today. I found an interesting article from the Chronicle of Higher Education concerning peer selection. The article includes a link to a database allowing an individual to select a university and view results three different ways.

1. Which Universities does the subject university consider as its peers.
2. Which universities consider the subject university its peer.
3. Cross-over of the first two questions.

This link will take you to the database page. Just select the university you are interested in and click on one of the drill downs to the right of the resulting page.

https://chronicle.com/article/Peers-Interactive-Data/134262/

This link will take you to the article itself.

https://chronicle.com/article/in-selecting-peers/134228/

[geezer]

Who your peers are depends a great deal on what aspects of the school you are looking at. Who are Lamar's peers in the fields of engineering? Who are LU's peers in athletics? Who are LU's peers in size? In funding? Nursing?

[LUSportsFan]

I think those are all valid points. According to the linked article (second link above), the database of 1,600 universities was based on the following:

"...Each year colleges submit "comparison groups" to the U.S. Department of Education to get feedback on how their institution stacks up in terms of finances, enrollment, and other measures tabulated in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System..."

The IPEDS site (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) is another slick site with a lot of useful information.

https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/

The companies that I worked for identified their peers. Measures considered important by our management to help determine competitiveness were developed. We used our position within our peer group as one of the performance indicators. As a result, we had a pretty good idea of how we compared with the peers. We had highly summarized financial data available on the network. Every employee had access to the summarized information. I always thought it was a good way to get all the employees to buy into and work toward a common goal ultimately benefiting the company and in turn the employee. To further enforce the importance of our position relative to our peers, a portion of our incentive compensation was based on our company's performance in relation to those peers.

I'm sure that there are different applications in the academic world, but based on my experience, I think a realistic or aspirational peer group can be very useful. Utilization of peer groups help you keep from looking at things "with blinders on". Also, in the case of aspirational peers, peer groups can help you work toward a goal.

[geezer]

I understand where you are coming from. My points were more that you have to look the criteria for the comparison. In some areas LU is a much better school than some would give it credit and in others it has a lot of room to improve. I would assume for purposes of this message board the focus would be about athletic peers and what will it take to get more enthusiasm for LU from the general public.

[LUSportsFan]

My understanding was that the Kampus Corner tab was more for things not associated with athletics. If that's not the case, I'll stop posting about Investing in the Future, budgets, State Legislature sessions affecting our funding, our Forbes rating, etc and only concentrate on athletics in all the other tabs. As an out of towner who thinks he owes a lot to the University, I consider the non-athletic topics as important just as I do the athletics related ones. I thought others might also. We've had some pretty good discussions not related to athletics in the Kampus Corner tab in the past. I found those most informative.

If we only want to discuss athletics on this board, we may as well remove this tab because all the athletics are already covered elsewhere in at least seven tabs specifically dedicated to athletics. I've participated in athletics discussions and what I consider our athletics peers in other tabs. I intend to do that in the future as well.

I didn't intend the peer topic to be either good or bad. The intent was informational. My understanding is that the first list is sourced from our academic administrators and faculty to use as tools. The other view provides an indication of "the outside looking in"...how some others view us. We're in pretty good company on both lists. I thought our list looked very reasonable as compared to a lot of other universities. A lot of the others fit more into the article's conclusion that most of the peer lists might be more aspirational.

[coachacola]

I think Kampus Korner is for stuff that's going on around campus not necessarily related to athletics. I assumed LUSportsFan was talking about peer institutions academic-wise. When it comes to athletics, I think schools try to get into conferences with schools they consider their peers, both academically and athletically.