Financial Compass auto-generates peer schools by checking mutual listings with the NCES, then expands to peers of peers if needed. If a school submits no peer list, the system ranks schools that list it as a peer by enrollment size. Users can edit or remove any suggestion.
Chapters
I was focused on back then. It's still the same story for Wabash, but let me show you a little bit of new functionality here.
If you click on a school, Wabash, a new thing happens. You get a peer set populating immediately. So we get up to 10 schools. How does this peer set get populated? Really simply, it's the set of schools where Wabash said that. So for example, Wabash said Ohio Wesleyan. Was a peer.
I think that's true.
I'd have to go back, but they report a peer set to the NCES, and so every—
almost every school does. And so I'm looking for confirmation from both schools that they're both saying, yeah, we're both— we're a peer. So that means Wabash says Ohio Wesleyan's a peer, and Ohio Wesleyan says Wabash is a peer.
All right, so if I don't get to 10 doing that cross-double confirmation, the next set is the following. If Wabash— say Wabash and Ohio Wesleyan both say they're peers, and then Ohio Wesleyan says, say, Wooster is a peer, and Wooster also says Ohio Wesleyan is a peer. We call this the property of transitivity. If Wabash and Ohio Wesleyan are peers, and Ohio Wesleyan and Wooster are peers, then that should mean that Wabash—
you paid attention in math class, didn't you?
It's called Transitivity in economics.
Yes. So I want that law of transitivity to be satisfied.
So that's the second tier, sort of peers of peers.
So double confirmation again, making that connection.
If a school doesn't have any of that, which happens usually when they just don't submit their peer list, I populate it.
So one school where that was the case is— there's lots, but Texas Christian is one.
They didn't submit a peer list. Um, so what I did was look for schools that said TCU was a peer of theirs.
Uh, so that's all of these schools, um, here actually— Drake, uh, SMU, Denver, and so on— and then just ranked those by how similar they were in terms of size, I think, after that. So that's how I get to 10 for most schools. Um, it's not always possible because, you know, some schools are just not listed one of the schools today that we're going to talk about is Paul Smith, uh, College in New York.
No peers get populated here. The reason is they didn't submit their own peer list and nobody lists Paul Smith College as a peer, or at least not at least 3.
So that's where I cut that.
But users can customize that list as well, right?
Yeah, you can change whatever you want. You don't have to even go with the list that I picked for you.
Um, I didn't pick it, but, uh, this populated list, you can change it, modify it, whatever. You can get rid of all of them. Whatever you want to do.
All right, so that's cool functionality.
So take, take advantage of that.
The advantage is you get a peer set comparison like right away, one click.
