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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Peer colleges is how colleges compare assessments such as faculty and student satisfaction, outcomes etc. and to identify a group of schools they should seek for faculty reviews for promotion and tenure cases.  It's part about matching "relative ranking" but it's more importantly about looking for schools with similar size, funding structures, academic structures etc.  So a tech university is going to have as a peer school other tech universities, a liberal arts college other LACs etc.  There aren't perfect matches usually so they choose some schools that match on a range of factors and not others and try to get a good enough list for their purposes.[/quote]
I don't think this is exactly the case, why do lower-ranked schools choose much more prestigious "peers" [b]when they know the favor wouldn't be returned[/b]. [/quote]

I'm a professor and this is how we use 'peer college lists.'  For a research university you need faculty's tenure cases to be reviewed by faculty at other research universities.  Take UMBC or GMU--both recent R1 institutions. They need to look at schools with similar research focus, not schools that are similarly ranked but with less research.  This ensures tenured faculty are experts. But the other R1 schools are all more established powerhouses who often have more resources for their faculty--there are less than 150 of them in the US.  And one of the questions asked by reviewers is whether that person would be granted tenure at your own institution.  So a place like Harvard notoriously doesn't grant tenure to hardly anyone (they fairly regularly don't grant tenure to tenure-track professors and instead do 'superstar' hires of established names for tenured positions) and they are a private institution, so that would not be a fair comparison.  But let's say University of Wisconsin--a higher ranked school with a lot more resources, but a faculty who gets tenure there is not that different from a faculty who gets tenure at UMBC or GMU. The peer list will likely also include some R2 universities that are trying to become R1s.  But they wouldn't include a higher ranked LAC or an R2 that's more like an LAC like W&M.

Fortunately the USNWR rankings and such aren't as meaningful at the faculty level--it's not like the best faculty go to the best institution--it's where there was a tenure line open in their field when they were looking--there may only be 10-20 tenure track positions in the whole country in your field in a given year depending on discipline.  Changing jobs on the tenure track is not done lightly because you've done a lot of work setting up a lab/research agenda/connections and you're mentoring graduate students you are often their livelihood through your grants for several years and you are overseeing their theses/dissertations.  Applying for a new position often involves a lot of intensive processes that last 6-9 months (including if you are a finalist doing a multi-day visit to a new institution where you give a public lecture, teach a class, have dozens of meetings) and then if you get the offer negotiating how your obligations on grants and with prior students will be handled.  The norm is to bloom in the first tenure line position where you initially plant yourself and stay or to switch maybe 1 or 2 times in your whole career (many faculty have also had post-docs, visiting or adjunct positions for the first years out of PhD so are eager to establish a research and teaching home where they can build things up a bit rather than reinventing the wheel each time).

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This is BS. All of the LAC's picked Dartmouth as a peer, yet Dartmouth didn't pick any LAC's and only picked top 10 schools. Why would that be? It's clearly not about similarity but about seeming more prestigious than one really is. [/quote]

Here's an article about the kinds of processes schools go through to get their peer institution list: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED531716.pdf

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