How Can Institutions Benchmark Themselves Against the Right Peers?

When universities discuss benchmarking, the conversation often begins with a familiar question: which institutions should we aspire to resemble? The answer is frequently a list of highly visible names. A university in its first decade may compare itself with a century-old public institution. A teaching-focused college may place itself against a research-intensive university. A regional institution may examine the raw publication volume of a national institute with a substantially different mandate, funding structure and student profile. Such comparisons may appear ambitious, but they are rarely diagnostic.

The real purpose of benchmarking is not to borrow prestige from a famous comparator. It is to understand performance with precision. An institution should be able to identify where it is strong, where it is underperforming, which improvements are realistic within a defined period and which structural constraints require a different strategy. This can happen only when the peer group is selected carefully.

The need for more disciplined comparison has become urgent because higher education is expanding and diversifying. UNESCO reported that global higher-education enrolment reached 269 million students in 2024, more than double the level recorded two decades earlier. Nearly 7.3 million students were studying abroad. In India, the Ministry of Education’s India Rankings 2025 exercise received 14,163 applications from 7,692 unique institutions. The ranking architecture covered seventeen categories and subject domains, compared with four in 2016. The expansion is not merely numerical. It signals a more complex ecosystem of universities, colleges, research institutions, open universities, skill universities and specialised institutions.

This complexity creates the central benchmarking problem: institutions may occupy the same education system without operating under comparable conditions. A multidisciplinary university, a specialist medical institution, an engineering college, an open university and a young private university may all be credible institutions. They should not automatically be measured against one another for every strategic decision. A single overall rank can offer a useful public reference point, but institutional planning demands a more granular method.

The first principle is that peer selection must begin with identity, not aspiration. Before selecting comparators, an institution must define its own operating profile. Its legal category, age, size, academic mix, degree levels, research intensity, student composition, geographical context, delivery model and resource base all matter. The All India Survey on Higher Education itself collects data on teachers, enrolment, programmes, examination results, education finance and infrastructure; it also calculates indicators such as institution density, Gross Enrolment Ratio, pupil-teacher ratio, Gender Parity Index and per-student expenditure.  These are not administrative details. They are the foundations of meaningful comparison.

An institution that ignores its own profile is likely to benchmark against the wrong denominator. Consider research output. Raw publication counts can be useful, but they can also reward scale. A university with several thousand faculty members will naturally operate differently from a smaller institution. The more revealing questions concern publications per eligible faculty member, citations relative to publication volume, sponsored research per faculty member, doctoral completions, the disciplinary spread of research and the consistency of performance over time. The same principle applies to placements, diversity, infrastructure and finance. Total expenditure is less informative than expenditure per student. The number of graduating students placed is incomplete without the size of the graduating cohort, the quality of roles, progression pathways and the programmes being assessed.

There is international evidence for this multidimensional approach. The 2025 Carnegie Institutional Classification in the United States reorganised institutions into thirty-one groups using characteristics such as degree-award profile, academic programme mix and size. Its stated purpose is to create more useful groupings of similar institution types. The lesson is not that India should copy another classification system. The lesson is that responsible benchmarking begins by recognising institutional difference.

At IIRC, a practical approach is to build a Four-Circle Peer Architecture. The first circle consists of structural peers: institutions with broadly comparable age, scale, academic profile, ownership context and student market. These institutions provide the fairest baseline. They help answer whether the institution is using its current resources effectively.

The second circle consists of performance peers: institutions operating within a similar score band but demonstrating different strengths. One may show stronger faculty depth, another better graduate outcomes and another more advanced digital systems. This circle is particularly useful because it reveals improvements that are achievable without requiring a complete change in institutional identity.

The third circle consists of aspirational peers: institutions one stage ahead in maturity, not several stages beyond it. They may possess stronger research systems, more developed industry linkages or better student-support mechanisms. Their purpose is to inform a three-to-five-year improvement agenda. An aspirational peer should stretch an institution, but it should not distort its priorities.

The fourth circle consists of frontier references. These are leading institutions selected for a specific practice rather than for wholesale comparison. A university may study one institution for its research governance, another for digital student services, a third for outcome-based curriculum design and a fourth for sustainability practices. Frontier references are valuable when used selectively. They become misleading when institutions treat exceptional performers as their only peers.

This distinction is important because benchmarking is not the same as imitation. Two institutions may adopt the same practice and produce different results because their students, faculty structures, local economies and institutional histories differ. A good benchmarking exercise therefore studies both the outcome and the conditions that produced it. It asks not only what the comparator achieved, but how, over what period, with which resources and under what constraints.

The next principle is that universities should benchmark dimensions, not merely positions. The India Rankings framework evaluates institutions through Teaching, Learning and Resources; Research and Professional Practice; Graduation Outcomes; Outreach and Inclusivity; and Perception. Its 2025 report notes that participating institutions maintain data on faculty strength, enrolment, placement outcomes, infrastructure, research productivity, library and laboratory resources and operational spending, enabling internal benchmarking and long-term planning. This is a significant idea. The most valuable ranking outcome is not the published position alone. It is the institutional ability to understand the drivers behind that position.

Within IIRC’s 9D Framework for Performance, Excellence and Impact, the same logic is extended through Direction, Design, Delivery, Depth, Digitalisation, Diversity, Discovery, Deployment and Distinction. A university may compare itself with one peer group for academic design, another for digital maturity and another for graduate deployment. It may discover that its reputation is ahead of its systems, or that its delivery is stronger than its external visibility. Such findings are more useful than a single undifferentiated score.

Benchmarking also requires a distinction between stock and flow. Stock indicators describe what an institution currently possesses: faculty strength, laboratories, infrastructure, patents, programmes or accumulated reputation. Flow indicators describe movement: improvement in student retention, growth in funded research, increase in doctoral completions, strengthening of faculty qualifications, progression in placement quality or reduction in unresolved student grievances. A mature institution should study both. A young institution should pay particular attention to trajectory. It may not match the accumulated research stock of an older university, but it can demonstrate a credible rate of improvement.

Time matters for another reason. One-year comparisons can be unstable. Leadership transitions, delayed grants, unusual placement cycles, changes in enrolment and exceptional research projects can temporarily alter results. The Carnegie classification uses multi-year data averages for its 2025 classifications. Institutions should adopt a similar principle for internal benchmarking wherever appropriate. A three-year view is often more revealing than a single-year snapshot, while a five-year view can show whether improvement is systemic or episodic.

The investigative question is whether an institution is benchmarking to improve or benchmarking to advertise. Vanity benchmarking has recognisable patterns. It selects famous comparators but avoids comparable ones. It highlights raw totals while ignoring scale. It celebrates a strong indicator without examining weaker dimensions. It changes the peer group whenever the result becomes uncomfortable. It treats participation in a ranking exercise as an end in itself. These practices create a favourable narrative, but they do not create institutional intelligence.

Responsible benchmarking requires governance. Institutions should define a stable peer set, document the logic behind each selection and review the set annually rather than casually. They should disclose which peers are structural, which are aspirational and which are frontier references. They should normalise indicators wherever scale can distort interpretation. They should compare performance across multiple years and record the source, definition and limitations of each metric. The OECD’s work on benchmarking higher-education systems similarly examined inputs, activities, outputs and outcomes, while warning that the evidence base has not always kept pace with changes in higher education. Data availability should therefore not be confused with data adequacy.

The final principle is humility. No benchmark can capture the complete identity of a university. Institutions serve different regions, disciplines and social purposes. A university with a strong access mission may create value that is not immediately visible through conventional research indicators. A specialised institution may excel within a narrow domain. A regional university may be deeply consequential to its local economy. Fair benchmarking does not weaken standards; it makes standards more intelligent.

The right peers are not always the most famous institutions. They are the institutions that make comparison useful. They reveal the distance already travelled, the weaknesses that must be confronted and the next level of performance that is realistically achievable. When institutions benchmark themselves against the right peers, rankings cease to be annual announcements. They become instruments of direction, evidence and continuous improvement.

Have a perspective? We invite you to share your observations, experiences, and recommendations on the themes discussed in this article. Your feedback helps enrich the conversation on higher education and institutional development. Write to us at director@iirc-rankings.com.