At 08:56 AM 11/18/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>We are deep into planning throughout our university - new President, etc.,
>etc.
>
>I have had a question put to me that I have no answer for - "How do you
>measure success relative to other institutions?"
>
>I have never used other institutions as benchmarks because I have always
>seen each as unique.
>
>Do any of you use some sort of yardstick to measure success that takes into
>account similar institutions?

Mary:

We select a list of universities that we consider to be similar to our own
in the ways that relate to the characteristic that we want to
benchmark.  In our case, we selected a list of about 20 universities that
are private, Carnegie Research-1 (back when there was such a thing), and
have medical schools.  Then we compare ourselves to that subset using total
and federal S&E R&D expenditures, S&E Obligations, S&E R&D Obligations, NIH
Obligations, NSF Obligations,  etc.  We make an attempt to do this also on
a per-capita basis using S&E faculty totals derived from a combination of
places including institutional websites, AAMC, ASPH and sometimes IPEDS.

Of course, we also look at our overall ranking among all institutions on
the basis of total and federal R&D expenditures, NIH awards, etc.  We use a
different list of institutions to compare our Medical School and Health
Sciences Center to other similar medical schools and HSCs, relying more on
AAMC, ASPH and NIH numbers.

In all cases, for us anyway, the most problematic numbers are the faculty
counts.  If we are measuring R&D progress on a per-capita basis, then we
really do not want to include faculty in non-S&E departments where research
is not a significant factor, however attempting to get good faculty counts
on a department-by-department basis is a major problem because of
differences in department titles, different definitions of "faculty," etc.

Randy.
_____________________________________________________________
<http://www.tulane.edu/~govtaff/rlhome.htm>Randall Legeai
Assoc. Director, Institutional Program Development
Tulane University, <http://www.tulane.edu/~govtaff/>Office of Institutional
Program Development and Government Affairs
1440 Canal St., Suite 2500
New Orleans LA 70112 -  (504) 988-3390; fax (504) 988-3388

======================================================================
 Instructions on how to use the RESADM-L Mailing List, including
 subscription information and a web-searchable archive, are available
 via our web site at http://www.hrinet.org (click on "Listserv Lists")
======================================================================