For students doing their college searches or for the counselors who are helping them, Katie Konrad Moore in our Bellevue, Washington office shared this with our Collegewise counselors yesterday: a tool from The Chronicle of Higher Education called “Who Does Your College Think Its Peers Are?”
You select a college, and it tells you not only which schools that college considers its collegiate peers, but also which colleges listed your selection as a peer. For example, if a student is interested in Colgate and wants to know what other colleges might be similar, select Colgate in the peer tool, and Bowdoin, Hamilton, Bucknell, Connecticut College, etc. come up.
It’s not meant to be used as a precise college search tool, and students shouldn’t assume that just because a school is listed as a peer necessarily means it should be added to your list. But the similarity hit-to-miss ratio is good enough that we find the tool helpful. Use it as a way to suggest schools that might be like the one you like—then do your own research to verify the findings.