Rethinking Higher Education Classifications For Today’s Institutions
By: Alison Griffin My 16-year-old son has a piece of paper, thumbtacked to his bedroom wall: a list of about 30 colleges and universities, carefully ordered alongside checkmarks and crosshatches. Upon first glance, the list wouldn’t make much sense to anyone, but perhaps another teenager. The way in which he has grouped colleges together is based on three things: campus aesthetics, …
How Carnegie Classification Updates Could Affect State Higher Education Policy
By: Mushtaq Gunja and Sara Gast Since 1973, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education has served as the predominant framework to classify American colleges and universities. It was originally created for researchers as a way of organizing the higher education sector, but since the release over 50 years ago, the classifications have informed many policies, reporting structures and benchmarking …
Reimagining the Elective Classifications
By Marisol Morales As part of the broader efforts to reimagine the Carnegie Classifications announced in 2022, the Universal and Elective Classifications were also brought together in the same organizational home at the American Council on Education to help further show the breadth and range of the missions and purposes of American higher education. That transition has also prompted the exploration …
Changes to the Next Iteration of the Carnegie Classifications: We Want Your Feedback
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 …
Reflections on a Year Studying Carnegie’s Basic Classification and a Look Ahead
By Mushtaq Gunja and Sara Gast As the work continues to modernize and reimagine the Carnegie Classifications, we want to share insights we have gained as we look toward the release by early 2025 of a new set of classifications that will include a new research classification methodology. The Carnegie Classifications were created to be a tool to organize the diverse …