Business Commons^™

Proposal Of A New Method To Classify Higher Education Institutions Instead Of Rankings, Kate D. Elam

Undergraduate Distinction Papers

Purpose – The objective of this paper is to propose a new method for classifying higher education institutions that differs from traditional rankings. The proposed model segments colleges and universities based on like attributes and describes the groups according to their differentiating features.

Research Method – Data from several rankings publications was collected and simplified for analysis. Several observations (i.e. schools) were eliminated because they did not fit the sampling frame and/or did not include a sufficient amount of information. Duplicate variables (i.e. attributes) were also eliminated. First, exploratory factor analysis was applied to reduce the number of variables being …