The New Carnegie classifications: https://carnegieclassifications.acenet.edu/saec/
This is the new system for American Universities:
From The Chronicle: New Carnegie Classification Aims to Shake Up How Higher Ed Sees Itself, 24 April 2025:
The yardstick that many colleges use to evaluate their place in the world is about to display new units of measurement. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Council on Education released today the redesigned Carnegie classifications, which are intended to better reflect the varied missions and achievements of the country’s colleges.
The classifications are meant to be descriptive categories, not another ranking to climb, the foundation and ACE have long held.
But that hasn’t stopped university leaders from striving. Many have treated the attainment of R1 status, designating the highest level of research activity, as a key objective in the quest to make their institutions — and their careers — into success stories. Along the way, the classifications have been criticized for affixing prestige to research at the expense of other institutional imperatives, like teaching.
So the foundation and ACE have overhauled the classifications. They’ve kept the research designations, but split them apart from their overall classification of colleges. Earlier this year, they released revised research categories, with the goals of broadening the set of institutions that can be recognized for their research output and encouraging colleges to be less laser-focused on research.
Today’s release reworks the new overall classification. Here’s what has changed:
- “Institutional” is the new “basic”: The overall “basic” categorization assigned to every institution has been rebranded as the “institutional classification.” The old label was determined mostly by the highest degree an institution awarded. The new label now looks at a broader set of criteria: the mix of degrees awarded, the fields those degrees are in, and the institution’s size.
- Student-centered measures: A new classification, called “student access and earnings,” is meant to highlight the students colleges enroll and how they fare. Access is measured by comparing the shares of a college’s students who receive federal Pell Grants and come from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups against the demographics of the areas it serves. The earnings metric weighs financial-aid recipients’ earnings eight years after they enter the institution against the median pay of their geographic peers.
- “Opportunity” as an aspiration: Institutions that excel at both of the access and earnings metrics will be designated as “Opportunity Colleges and Universities,” a phrase that may soon be emblazoned across college websites and viewbooks.
Quotable: “We’re trying to incentivize student success,” said Timothy Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation. “We’re not trying to incentivize the allocation of large tranches of capital to research activity, even if that’s not in your institutional mission.”
Change had been coming for the classifications well before President Trump began his second term. Now, though, his administration is using research funding as a means to bring colleges to heel — and some institutions are fighting back by making a stronger case for the civic value of the research they produce. It’s a tricky time to downplay the importance of that research.
The bigger picture: Will the revised classifications be enough of an incentive to shift colleges’ behavior? And, given the Trump administration’s revocation of federal research grants, will observers be able to tell?
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Neville Buch
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