Director of Academic Planning and Analysis University of North Carolina System Office Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
Session Abstract: What is a Peer Institution and how do I decide which institutions are my peers? Every higher education institution can benefit from identifying peer institutions, which can be referenced for a variety of tasks such as benchmarking, strategic planning, and goal-setting. Peers can be defined a number of ways, and this presentation reviews the recent Peer Study revision at the University of North Carolina System Office, a strong and diverse public higher education system that enrolls ~250k students at 16 universities. The UNC System has more than $2.2 billion in research expenditures and campuses that serve every region of North Carolina including six HBCUs and HMSIs and a university for visual and performing arts. One of the largest challenges was developing decision criteria that would be equitable across the system while ensuring that individual university missions were incorporated. An evaluation of the existing methodology, peer list, and revision will be presented.
