Elon has 15 peer institutions and 47 colleges and universities chose Elon as one of its peers, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. Yet, none of Elon’s peers deemed Elon as one its peers, as of data from IPEDS for 2022-23. Many colleges and universities have not updated their peer institutions since then, with the exception of Furman University, where Elon is now one of its peers, according to its website.
Elon selected its peers in 2022, Jason Husser, chair of Elon’s Long Range Planning Committee, said. This committee was the primary group involved with finding Elon’s peers, with data from the office of institutional effectiveness. Husser said the main factor Elon prioritized was student learning.
Picking peers that also were peers with Elon was not a factor, because Husser described Peer Institutions as moving targets each school picks but did see the fact that 47 other schools chose Elon as a peer as a positive. According to research from Craig Willis, professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, only 23% of peer institutions are mutual peers, or both schools have put each other on its own lists of peer institutions.
“I remember being struck by just how many places picked Elon as a peer,” Husser said. “I think that's because Elon has been so successful, and its offerings for students, for student learning.”
What goes into a peer?
Peer Institutions are used as a point of comparison for many things at Elon’s campus and other schools. Husser said when picking schools, they used a dashboard to compare almost every university in the U.S. used in the U.S. News & World Report national rankings, including how engaged their alumni base is.
Other factors included retention rates, other places that prospective students applied and size of the institution — in terms of number of students, graduation rates, tuition and fees, Husser said.
Elon’s tuition and fees has consistently ranked lower than the majority of Elon’s peer institutions.
“We weren't trying to find a twin university out there, but places that we could see elements of Elon elements and Elon values of focusing on students and mission driven around students, we also collected extensive feedback from the university community as a whole,” Husser said.
Willis said an important factor to keep in mind is that many schools, including Elon, have multiple lists of peers to use for different purposes. Different schools and departments look at different schools for different occasions.
Husser said for many of the peers Elon selected, in some ways Elon is aspiring to be more like aspects of those schools, but in other ways Elon is ahead of them.
“A happy challenge with the process is that Elon is a pretty unique place in terms of its size as well as its level of offerings that it offers, its mix of graduate and undergraduate programs, and its suburban setting,” Husser said. “What we found were a number of places that had elements that felt like Elon to us.”