St. Olaf College Institutional Comparison Group

St. Olaf has identified a group of twenty higher education institutions that are similar to the college in a number of important respects. Data from these comparison institutions can provide helpful context in making decisions or evaluating outcomes.  The criteria used to select the group follows the list of institutions below:

The comparison group was selected from an initial pool of private, not for profit institutions with the following Carnegie Classification characteristics:

• Majority of students are undergraduate (Enrollment Profile)
• Some or no graduate degrees awarded (Undergraduate Instructional Program)
• Four-year small or medium size, highly residential (Size and Setting)
• Selective or more selective, lower transfer in (Undergraduate Profile)
• Primarily arts & sciences majors awarded, or balanced with professional majors (Undergraduate Instructional Program)

For each of the institutions in this initial pool, we calculated the total annual financial resources per student FTE, averaged over three years (FY2020, FY2021, FY2022), using publicly-available data from the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).  Total annual resources consisted of revenues from:

• Tuition and fees
• Government grants and contracts
• Private gifts, grants, or contracts/contributions from affiliated entities
• Other core revenues
• 5% of endowment assets for the most recent three fiscal years

We then rank-ordered the initial pool of institutions, including St. Olaf, according to their 3-year average total annual resources/student FTE.  The final institutional comparison group consists of the 10 institutions immediately above and below St. Olaf, relative to this measure of financial resources, so that St. Olaf’s financial resources would be at the median for our 20 comparison institutions.

Comparison group updated 3/14/2024