Undergraduate Instructional Program Classification

The Undergraduate Instructional Program Classification is based on three pieces of information: the level of undergraduate degrees awarded (associates or bachelor's), the proportion of bachelor's degree majors in the arts and sciences, in professional fields, and in career & technical fields for two-year institutions, and the extent to which an institution awards graduate degrees in the same fields in which it awards undergraduate degrees. All categories in this classification are determined using degree conferral data from the update year (2019-2020).

The distinction between arts and sciences and professional baccalaureate majors is one that has been made in the Classification since 1987 (but only for undergraduate colleges), and researchers and others in the higher education community have also made similar distinctions. We are extending and elaborating the previous analysis by (1) applying it to almost all baccalaureate-level institutions, (2) making finer distinctions along the arts & sciences – professions continuum, and (3) recognizing a "middle ground" where the two domains exist in relative balance with respect to graduating students' major concentrations.

With the 2015 update, we also added the designation of career & technical programs. These are defined as professional fields (per the baccalaureate designation), in which the majority of awards nationally are at the associates level or lower (certificate programs of less than two-years duration).

A high concentration of majors in the arts and sciences is not the same as a liberal arts education, and we do not view any particular location on this continuum as the special province of liberal education. Examples of high-quality liberal education exist across the spectrum.

Some institutions enroll no graduate students. Others may have graduate programs that operate relatively independently of the undergraduate program (such as a law school). Still others offer graduate education in most or all fields where they have undergraduate programs, and, of course, some institutions fall between these extremes. By examining the number of undergraduate fields in which we also see graduate degrees (as determined by overlap in the Department of Education CIP* codes under which baccalaureate and graduate degrees are recorded), we can locate institutions along this continuum of undergraduate-graduate "coexistence." Departments that teach only undergraduates can differ in many ways from those that also train graduate students. Examples of such differences include faculty activities and instructional resources.

Degree conferral data come from the IPEDS Completions survey corresponding to degree conferrals from July 1, 2019 through June 30, 2020. These were the most recent data available for all institutions as of 2021. In the Completions data, institutions report annual degree conferrals by degree level and field of study. Field of study is reported using a standard taxonomy known as the Classification of Instructional Programs, or CIP. The CIP groups fields under six-digit codes of the form xx.yyzz, which can be aggregated at the two-digit (xx) or four-digit (xx.yy) level.

The undergraduate instructional program classification is based on three pieces of information: Distribution of degrees (and certificates for associates institutions) across broad disciplinary areas (undergraduate program mix), and the extent to which an institution awards graduate degrees in the same fields as undergraduate degrees (graduate coexistence). Baccalaureate-granting schools awarding more associates degrees than bachelor's degrees were classified as "Baccalaureate/associates Colleges."

Special Focus (two-year and four-year) and Tribal Colleges were included as distinct categories for this classification.

In past updates of the Carnegie Classifications, Arts & Sciences and professional fields were generally defined at the 2-digit level of the CIP. With the 2015 update, we expanded that definition to the full 6-digit level of CIP codes. In most cases, the CIP codes for an entire 2-digit domain have the same designation. However, with this change, we have more comprehensively aligned the different field classification schemes used for associates degrees and less than two year certificate; baccalaureate degrees; and graduate degrees. The Completions data allow for up to two majors per degree, and we used information from both majors (thus the denominator in the percentage calculation is the total number of majors, which can be greater than the total number of bachelor's degrees because of double majors). The mapping of fields of study to arts & sciences or professions is documented in this Excel file.

We assigned associates institutions to one of three categories, grouping the corresponding categories of the basic classification. High transfer includes institutions in which fewer than 35.8 percent of awards (associates degrees and less than two-year certificates) were awarded in vocational & technical fields (see the Basic Classification methodology for more details). At the other end of the spectrum, high vocational & technical includes institutions in which 53.5 percent or more of the awards were conferred in vocational & technical fields. The remaining associates colleges were designated as "mixed transfer/vocational & technical."

We assigned four-year institutions to one of five categories based on the proportion of bachelor's degrees awarded in arts & sciences and professional fields. Institutions with at least 80 % of bachelor's degrees in arts and sciences or professional fields were assigned to the corresponding "focus" pole of the continuum, and the remaining schools were assigned to the middle categories according to most majors (with the boundaries set at 60 % of the corresponding domain). The middle category thus includes institutions with 41 to 59 % of bachelor's degrees in each domain.