The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting thing. It's a survey conducted in 2012 of 1,595 colleges and universities in the US (or at least of individuals representing them) asking which schools that college perceives as peer institutions. The results are here, in interactive graphic form. There's lots of dots, each dot is a school, color-coded by Carnegie classification, which is named if you put your curser on it. Click on it, and it gives you a list of all the schools that school sees as peers and all the schools that see themselves as peers of that school. Who Does Your College Think Its Peers Are? - The Chronicle of Higher Education Some of the comparisons seem plausible to me and some are pretty bogus. The University of Phoenix perceives Stanford as a peer institution? (Yeah, right.)
My uni was picked by UoP. By the way, we're not Stanford, not even close, but neither are we close (IMO) to UoP, either--pretty much exactly in the middle of the spectrum between the two. I'd say the only schools for profits are truly peers of is other for profits. Not that that's the ultimate slam, because most of them offer legitimate educations, but they are different animals from research universities, the model's very different.
Most delusional finalist. Regent picked, inter alia: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt, the Air Force Academy and Notre Dame. IN your complete and total dreams. This wasn't your "aspirational" list, as in aspire to within a century, this was peers, as in right now. Please! Most snobby finalist. Harvard picked only three schools: Yale, Princeton, Stanford. Really, you snobs? Not even MIT across the river, which has several programs superior to your offerings? No Chicago, UC Berkeley, virtually all of the Ivies, including Penn with the Wharton School?
There are a few non-profits that are similar to for-profits. SNHU is the biggest one. Then, there are a couple of for-profits that operate similarly to non-profits. I would consider WGU and Patten to be peer institutions.
SNHU is a very traditional nonprofit university in many respects. Looks like any old college campus, very pretty with the brick buildings and all, has a largely residential faculty, the sports teams, the 80+ year history, looks like a very average directional university, like a smaller version of my uni. On the other hand, they advertise the living daylights out of their online programs and milk them like a cash cow just like the for-profits, and checking out their faculty for my discipline, pretty darned inbred, as in over 50% with grad degrees from SNHU. That's very for-profit-esque.
