A new Student Access and Earnings Classification recognizes the wide variety of institutions fostering opportunities for students nationwide
Washington, D.C. — The American Council on Education (ACE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Carnegie Foundation) published today the latest in a series of updates to the Carnegie Classifications. The redesigned system includes a revision of the historic Basic Classification, now titled the Institutional Classification, and a newly developed Student Access and Earnings Classification.
These updates are intended to reflect the multifaceted nature of higher education in the 21st century and measure the extent to which institutions provide students access and a path to earning competitive wages. Additionally, the Carnegie Classifications now identify institutions within the Student Access and Earnings Classification that can serve as models for studying how campuses can foster student success, designating 479 of them as Opportunity Colleges and Universities.
“The majority of students apply to college with the hope it is a path to opportunity, and the job they’ve dreamt about,” said Timothy F.C. Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation. “This work is about ensuring that institutions are recognized when they empower students to reach their goals and succeed.”
“Hundreds of institutions nationwide are providing students an excellent opportunity to use higher education as a springboard to a better life,” said Ted Mitchell, president of ACE. “The Student Access and Earnings Classification highlights the depth and breadth of schools where student success is front and center.”
About the 2025 Institutional Classification
Since 1973, the Carnegie Classification has served as the gold standard for organizing the landscape of U.S. higher education. The 2025 Institutional Classification updates the historic approach to grouping similar colleges and universities, now organizing institutions by multiple characteristics, including their size, the types of degrees they award, and the fields of study in which students receive their degrees.
By using multidimensional categories to group institutions, the Institutional Classification better reflects the wide variety of institutional missions and organizational structures that exist today. This update addresses the limitations of the historic Basic Classification, which organized most institutions primarily by academic program concentration or the highest degree awarded and fell short of adequately describing the full scope of activity on campuses across the country.
The multidimensional groupings of the Institutional Classification are designed to make the Carnegie Classifications more relevant and useful for policymakers, funders, researchers, and others who rely on the classification system for a comprehensive view of higher education in the United States.
“With this redesign of the Carnegie Classifications, we set out to measure what matters,” said Mushtaq Gunja, executive director of the Carnegie Classification systems and senior vice president at ACE. “Nowadays, institutions can’t be reduced down to the highest degree they award because they exist to serve a wide range of students in a wide variety of ways. Using multiple factors in how we classify institutions is an essential step toward making the classifications more useful to researchers, policymakers, funding agencies, and others.”
About the 2025 Student Access and Earnings Classification
The 2025 Student Access and Earnings Classification focuses on student success. The classification measures whether institutions are enrolling and creating opportunities for students in communities the institutions serve and whether students earn competitive wages after they attend.
The Student Access and Earnings Classification recognizes a wide variety of institutions of all sizes, locations, and types as drivers of opportunities for students. 479 schools have been named Opportunity Colleges and Universities, a new designation that identifies institutions within the classification that can serve as a model for studying how campuses can foster student success.
This new classification uses the multidimensional groupings of the 2025 Institutional Classification to evaluate student access and earnings between similar colleges and universities. By evaluating student access and earnings among peer campuses, the Classifications aim to foster collaboration and institutional improvement with a focus on how comparable higher education can foster opportunities for student success. The methodology also considers location data for each institution, comparing an institution’s data to the relevant geographical context.
Over the past three years, the Carnegie Classifications team met with thousands of stakeholders, including economists and higher education experts on our Technical Review Panel, to gather feedback on these updates and refine the methodology. The Institutional Classification and Student Access and Earnings Classification are part of an ongoing effort to make the Classifications more useful, relevant, and reflective of the nation’s ever-evolving higher education landscape.
About the American Council on Education
ACE is a membership organization that leads higher education with a united vision for the future, galvanizing our members to make change and collaborating across the sector to design solutions for today’s challenges, serve the needs of a diverse student population, and shape effective public policy. As the major coordinating body for the nation’s colleges and universities, our strength lies in our diverse membership of more than 1,600 colleges and universities, related associations, and other organizations in America and abroad. ACE is the only major higher education association to represent all types of U.S. accredited, degree-granting colleges and universities. For more information, please visit www.acenet.edu or follow ACE on X (formerly known as Twitter) @ACEducation and LinkedIn.
About the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
The mission of the Carnegie Foundation is to catalyze transformational change in education so that every student has the opportunity to live a healthy, dignified, and fulfilling life. Enacted by an act of Congress in 1906, the Foundation has a rich history of driving transformational change in the education sector, including the establishment of TIAA-CREF and the creation of the Education Testing Service, the GRE, Pell Grants, and the Carnegie Classifications for Higher Education.
Media Contacts:
Jon Riskind (ACE)
202-697-0741
[email protected]
Kito Cetrulo (Carnegie Foundation)
650-566-5100
[email protected]