In August 2004, a month after Ohio University President Roderick McDavis was inaugurated, U.S. News & World Report rated OU the 46th best public university in the nation and the 98th best overall.
It is now listed as the 65th best public university and the 131st best overall, according to U.S. News’ 2012–13 rankings, constituting a 41.3 percent drop among public schools and a 33.7 percent drop among both public and private schools.
“U.S. News & World Report is kind of a grab bag,” said Ann Fidler, chief of staff for the provost and chief financial officer. “They take information from various sources … it’s really hard to put a reliance on those numbers.”
OU’s Office of Institutional Research uses those metrics and information from the U.S. Department of Education to measure itself against a list of aspirational peer institutions.
When McDavis began as president, OU administrators tended to compare the university to other Ohio institutions, based on a variety of undefined variables, McDavis said.
“We were all over the map,” he said. “So I said, ‘Well, let’s come up with a standard set of variables that we can compare ourselves to.’ ”
After working with Michael Williford, associate provost for Institutional Research and Assessment, McDavis said they narrowed the list to 10 institutions in 2004: Auburn University, Clemson University, Indiana University Bloomington, University of Connecticut, University of Delaware, University of Missouri, University of New Hampshire, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Tennessee and Washington State University.
All of the peer institutions are located outside of Ohio, though four Ohio universities list OU as one of their peer institutions, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Notably, the OU Board of Trustees did not use this group of institutions when developing McDavis’ new contract — instead, they compared his salary against nine other Ohio schools.
The peer institutions were selected from all U.S. public doctoral universities that are research extensive. Institutional Research identified 48 variables to examine, from which the office created a list of 29 universities — which was then narrowed to 10 by administrators, according to the OU Peer University Study Report.
The average U.S. News 2012–13 public university ranking for OU’s institutional peers is 35 — all schools rank higher on the list than OU, and UNC at Chapel Hill has the best ranking, at 5.
But general rankings don’t always tell the full story when it comes to benchmarking, said Drew Clark, director of institutional research at Auburn University.
“Benchmarking is always a very tricky exercise because no two institutions are exactly alike, and even if they were, they don’t have exactly the same buttons they can press,” Clark said.
According to data compiled by OU Institutional Research in 2010–11 (the latest available year), OU’s incoming freshman class had the lowest percentage of freshmen who had graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class, at 16 percent. It also had the second-highest freshman acceptance rate, at 82 percent.
Under the benchmark category of “Student Experience,” OU had the highest percentage of classes with fewer than 20 students, and the second lowest percentage of classes with more than 50 students. It was above average when it came to students living on campus but had a higher-than-average student-faculty ratio.
OU also had the lowest average salary for full and assistant professors and the third lowest for associate professors — though it was higher in the rankings for total compensation, according to the U.S. Department of Education data.
The often-large deviations between OU and its peers led McDavis to try to develop a new list — one that has institutions more similar to OU’s, he said.
“What we came to over the last few years, was that we probably ought to be surrounding ourselves with institutions that are about one standard deviation away from us …” McDavis said. “So if you compare yourself, it’s almost apples to apples, because (on the current list of peer institutions), with some of those, it’s apples to oranges.”
Due to OU’s characteristics, including a mission to increase access to higher education, there are very few universities that can be considered true comparisons, Fidler said.
“The aspirational peer list was an interesting concept, but as we’ve tried to use it over the years, it’s become more and more frustrating,” she said.
The new list will use many of the same comparison variables but will focus primarily on academics, McDavis said.
“It’s a very interesting way to come up with a set of peers — let’s start out with academics, then let’s look at the other variables, whether it be finance, whether it be salary, compensation, whatever those other things are — let’s let the academic quality pieces be the driver,” McDavis said.
bv111010@ohiou.edu
