There are thousands of wonderful schools in the United States, ranging from the Ivy League to community colleges. Some are public universities and some private colleges. Some are exclusive, where others are accessible. Some focus on teaching while others are substantially research institutions: Universities have seemingly orthogonal missions, such as education and scholarship, that mesh together in many different ways.

Here we assemble data about major American colleges and universities, and try to put it all in context. How do colleges compare to their peers? For each school from Harvard on down, we show which other institutions are most similar to it, and what are the outstanding features where they stand out, for better or worse. We even provide a short writeup about each school to provide some additional context.

Another product of this analysis is a collection of data-driven rankings of colleges on both major dimensions (prestige, research/scholarship, visibility, and social good), along with a host of minor ones (e.g. sports performance, social media visibility). Together with our blog, they provide an overview of the landscape of higher education in the United States.