by Mushtaq Gunja and Sara Gast
Today, the American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching announced that the 2025 Carnegie Classifications will include a new Basic Classification that will organize institutions based on multidimensional categories that reflect a variety of characteristics about today’s colleges and universities. While this is an exciting development in our work to reimagine the Carnegie Classifications, it is not the final step. We want your feedback, and there is more on that below.
We are making these changes to better capture the dynamic and complex missions of today’s higher education institutions. The original Carnegie Classifications debuted in 1973, and while they have undergone updates in the last 50 years, the overall organizational approach has largely stayed the same. The Basic Classification applies a single label to each institution (such as Master’s Colleges and Universities: Medium Programs) that focuses on the highest degree awarded, and this narrow focus can often lead to dissimilar institutions being grouped together – which goes against the purpose of a classification system. For example, institutions that are similar in one way (such as awarding more than 100 master’s degrees but fewer than 200) may be very different on other institutional characteristics, like their size and academic programming, the ratio of undergraduate to graduate students, their fuller degree and certificate profile, whether and how they offer distance education, whether their campus is more residential, their financial resources, and so on. Instead of a single dimension, we want to create groupings of institutions that share similarities on multiple characteristics.
We know the Basic Classification has historically played a pivotal role in categorizing and characterizing colleges and universities in the United States, and we have also heard from institutional researchers and other users of the classifications that the current structure can be limiting. Our hope is that by shifting the overall classification structure to use a variety of universal, multidimensional institutional characteristics that better organize similar types of institutions, we will create a more usable classification system for researchers, policymakers, funders, and others.
Provide Your Feedback
As we design this multidimensional classification structure, we welcome your input – especially as we want to ensure the Carnegie Classifications are more usable for the field. We are particularly interested in hearing your thoughts about such topics as:
- Which dimensions or characteristics would maximize the creation of peer groups of institutions (e.g., size, highest degree awarded, location, financial resources)
- How those dimensions would be defined (e.g., how to define location)
- How many dimensions and how many groupings would be most useful (e.g., three dimensions that create 48 groupings; five dimensions that create 100 groupings)
- Whether certain types of institutions, such as colleges that primarily award associate degrees, should have different characteristics in creating peer groups
- What additional data would be helpful for users to create custom groupings (e.g., religious affiliation, MSI status)
- How certificate or other non-degree program data should be utilized
- The continued development or release of data that was incorporated in the other universal classifications (i.e., Undergraduate Instructional Program, Graduate Instructional Program, Enrollment Profile, Undergraduate Profile, Size and Setting)
- What should be the name of this classification, which has been known as the Basic Classification since 2005
- Other topics related to classification usage or design preferences
If you are interested in sharing input with the Carnegie Classifications team about these topics, please visit the 2025 Carnegie Classifications webpage. We are asking for all feedback to be submitted by February 29, 2024. We will then make final decisions and release the methodology later next year.
We look forward to hearing your ideas and input, and we will share more updates and reflections on this blog as we review the feedback and prepare for the 2025 release of the classifications.
Mushtaq Gunja and Sara Gast are executive director and deputy executive director, respectively, of the Carnegie Classifications.
