The Carnegie Classifications were created over half a century ago with a clear purpose: offering researchers a more nuanced understanding of the nation’s higher education landscape.
Since then, the classifications have evolved to have an outsized influence on institutional benchmarks, organization, and resources, largely shaped by the chase for an R1 designation and a high U.S. News & World Report ranking. When ACE took on the work of stewarding the classifications in 2022, the transition created a moment to reset and ensure the Carnegie Classifications were serving their fundamental purpose of organizing and categorizing the U.S. higher education sector. We also wanted to focus on how institutions were serving students through the lens of a classification system.
When we set out to redesign the Carnegie Classifications, we had some clear goals: to right-size how they influence policy and practice, center students in the methodology, and provide a more meaningful, multidimensional framework that both reflects higher education in the 21st century and pushes the field to focus on what matters most.
What We’ve Heard
Over the course of the last three and a half years, we connected with more than 10,000 stakeholders to hear from them about what works, what didn’t work, and what they want the Carnegie Classifications to be.
Across these conversations, several themes consistently emerged: a desire for more nuanced ways to understand the sector, greater clarity on how the classifications were developed, and better insight into the factors that determine an institution’s classification.
We heard that the focus on research was overemphasized, driving an outsized amount of time and money to be spent on the “chase for R1,” while also being opaque and informing rankings systems that have little to do with the intent of the classification. At the same time, we heard that a wide variety of research happening beyond the R1 and R2 categories was not recognized.
Our conversations around the design of a new classification system that would be focused on students’ social and economic mobility – which ultimately resulted in the Student Access and Earnings Classification – felt relevant to leaders and experts throughout the sector. They shared frustrations with ranking systems and how components like geography or different program types were not taken into account in existing models.
These insights informed key decisions in the Carnegie Classification’s redesign.
The 31 groupings in the 2025 Institutional Classification were developed to provide more nuance, multidimensionality, and transparency, better capturing the variety of institutional types and organizational structures that exist today. This classification now organizes institutions by multiple characteristics, including their size, the types of degrees they award, and the fields of study in which students receive their degrees.
The update addresses many of 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 describing a fuller scope of activity on campus.
Additionally, the research designations are now independent from the Institutional Classification, the methodology for determining R1 now uses a clear threshold, and a new designation, Research Colleges and Universities, recognizes research happening at colleges and universities that offer few or no research doctorates.
We also introduced the Student Access and Earnings Classification, providing a classification-based lens for how to consider how well institutions are serving students compared to similar types of institutions.
While no classification system can perfectly capture the complexity of the higher education landscape, the feedback we have received has been invaluable in shaping how we offer a more informative, accurate, and useful system for understanding the field.
As expected, these updates come with a learning curve, particularly the new Institutional Classification. People naturally seek simple ways to understand and categorize complexity — winners and losers, best and worst, high and low. The redesigned Institutional Classification instead presents a spectrum that aims to capture the wide variety of institutions that exist today. Some institutions have struggled to understand where they fit into the new framework or have asked us about choices we made in the methodologies. Here are a few of the questions that we tend to hear most.
“What drives the Institutional Classification?”
The Institutional Classification aims to capture more of the typical or median student experience as opposed to the prior methodology’s focus on the highest degree awarded. So, while an institution might grant many different types of degrees, the Award Level Focus generally describes where an institution awards the most and/or has a sufficient emphasis.
Additionally, although an institution may offer a range of programs, for most colleges, the Academic Program Mix reflects the fields of study in which at least 50% of its undergraduate students major. Generally, institutions are classified as Special Focus if they award at least 50% of degrees in a single academic area, concentrated field of study, or set of related fields. These institutions may award degrees in other subject areas, and special focus should not be interpreted as the institution’s only academic program – but it is the field of study that at least 50% of its students pursue for their degree.
In considering these dimensions, along with size, institutions are classified alongside those that award the same types of degrees, in the same fields of study, and generally operate at the same scale.
“Is it fair to compare a school that produces all the teachers in the community to an institution that does not? Doesn’t your focus on earnings hurt institutions that prepare students for socially beneficial but lower paid professions?”
By using earnings to measure outcomes, we’re holding institutions accountable for delivering on one of the fundamental promises of higher education. At the same time, we recognize that earnings potential differs between career fields and job markets.
Here are a few ways our methodology aims to account for those differences:
- Schools with similar programs of study are classified together. For example, art schools are grouped with other art schools, and schools that focus primarily on engineering and technology are grouped with other schools that focus primarily on engineering and technology. That means earnings data is more comparable and reflects the outcomes of those who attend similarly focused programs. In other words, the earnings data for a visual artist who attended a design school isn’t competing with a biomedical engineer who attended a STEM-focused institution.
- By using the median average of earnings — and not the mean — the data isn’t influenced by outliers. The income of a multimillionaire doesn’t skew the data upward in the same way the income of a substitute teacher doesn’t skew the data downward. We’re looking at the middle ground and focusing on the realistic earnings of a typical former student – the 50th percentile. For many institutions, this would likely be the earnings of a student who majored in one of their largest programs. At the average institution with an education program, around 5% of students majored in teacher education.
- We also accounted for the ways race, ethnicity, and geography intersect with earnings data to offer more nuanced insight into how students performed as compared to their peers, recognizing that labor markets are different in different pockets of the country.
- We are using an earnings measure that is eight years out from entry. Most students have had some time to enter the workforce, and while they would still be in the early stages of their career, if they are working in a full-time job, they are likely contributing positively to their institution’s median earnings value. For many socially beneficial professions, like teaching and social work, demand to fill those roles is high.
“Why do you count all students for the Student Access and Earnings Classification, not just those who completed?”
We know some measures evaluate colleges and universities based only on the data for students who have completed. Our approach aims to understand, in part, how the experience at an institution equipped all students to advance their social and economic mobility.
For many students, completing their degree provides a credential that is rewarded in the labor market. Other students may complete a credential — which is not often counted as completion — such as a certificate program or other coursework that provides them with an opportunity to advance their career. We wanted to capture all of those experiences to the fullest extent the data allows.
We also did not want to classify institutions based on only a small portion of their student body, which would be the case for some institutions that have low completion rates. We see potential in studying how many other data points, including retention and completion rates, cost and debt loads, workplace learning opportunities, as well as job placement, intersect with the Student Access and Earnings Classification.
“Why didn’t you include cost in the Student Access and Earnings Classification?”
Cost or price is another measure that others may choose to incorporate in their measures of value or return on investment, which is a reasonable approach. Our classification system aims to identify which institutions, in the context of their peer groups, are providing higher levels of access and higher-than-expected earnings outcomes for students. On an institution’s dashboard, we report data related to average net price, as this can be helpful context to consider, but it is not what the Student Access and Earnings Classification measures.
“What data are you going to use going forward? Are you going to be able to do this again?”
We know there are questions about what data the federal government will collect and publish moving forward. We will make determinations about what data we will use for the 2028 Carnegie Classifications as we better understand the data landscape in the coming years.
What’s Next?
We are already exploring ways we can continue to refine the classifications as we look toward the next release in 2028. Some of the most consistent areas of feedback have centered around how geography and regionality factor into the methodology, where associate colleges fit, and how we will measure elements like research activity.
In states where conversations are happening about the value of higher education, we hope the Student Access and Earnings Classification will be used as a tool to inform those discussions and help set meaningful benchmarks. We have also been encouraged to hear that institutions often find the other campuses within their Institutional Classification to be more natural peers, which we hope will equip institutions, researchers, accreditors, and others to foster more benchmarking and collaboration to drive toward shared goals.
We overhauled the Carnegie Classifications to make them more useful, relevant, and reflective of the nation’s ever-evolving higher education landscape. But this redesign is not a one-and-done deal. This is just the beginning of an ongoing effort to better equip the field to center student success and focus on the true value of higher education and how it intersects with important conversations like cost, access, and outcomes.
We believe the redesigned Carnegie Classifications can serve as a tool for building a better, more student-centered higher education sector, and we are committed to transparency, accountability, and partnership as we work on updates.
Thank you for your feedback so far, and feel free to share more at [email protected].
