By: Alison Griffin
This piece originally posted on Forbes on January 27, 2024.
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, geographic factors (you better believe “sunny at least 300 days of the year” is on the list of criteria for this Colorado kid), and athletic prowess.
When I asked him to describe the list in more detail – specifically the ordering of the institutions and his rationale behind the imperfect categorization – he told me he is looking at each campus based on the factors that matter most to him. Fair – for a 16-year-old, but not his higher ed policy wonk mom.
I pressed him on how different the list might look if he included factors such as academic programs (does the college even offer the academic major in which he has interest?), the percentage of students who received financial aid against the cost of attendance, or the diversity of the student body. He shrugged his shoulders.
As we continued the conversation about his somewhat imperfect list and categorization, and I sought to make sense of what he had constructed, I could not help but think about the work the American Council of Education (ACE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching are doing to reimagine the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, known as the Carnegie Classifications.
In 2022, ACE and the Carnegie Foundation – set out to modernize the Carnegie Classifications, the framework that has been used by researchers, institutions, and policymakers to classify American colleges and universities for nearly five decades. I imagine that while I have a few colleagues who understand the evolution of the Carnegie Classifications over the last fifty years, the majority of Americans (much like my teenage son) would just shrug their shoulders.
And for good reason. Previous versions of the Carnegie Classifications were never really intended for broad public use or consumption. The classifications were a tool developed by a small team of education policy researchers to better understand characteristics of higher education and then used largely among the higher education research community.
As ACE and the Carnegie Foundation started to examine ways in which the Carnegie Classifications could evolve, it became clear that the framework – once developed by higher education researchers, yet largely unchanged since 1973 – had failed to keep pace with the evolving and rapidly diversifying higher education landscape.
“The original classification structure may have made perfectly good sense 50 years ago, but our way of organizing institutions has not evolved as institutions themselves have grown and changed in any number of ways,” said Mushtaq Gunja, executive director of the Carnegie Classifications.
As Gunja and deputy executive director of the Carnegie Classifications Sara Gast began talking with stakeholders – from higher education presidents and chancellors, to provosts and academic deans, to higher education researchers and non-profit education organizational leaders – they learned that the relatively static version of the Carnegie Classifications were actually being used to inform federal and state policy and undergird college magazine rankings frameworks. Some campuses even use their classification on public marketing banners and collateral.
In addition to updating the classification framework to better reflect the diversity and complexity of the present higher education landscape, the variety of use cases for the classifications that were impacting consumer decisions became another factor driving the need to modernize the system.
“When we started our work, our top priority was to learn from as many people as possible about how they interact with the classifications, both in intended and unintended ways. Those conversations led to a number of discoveries and reinforced to us how important it is to bring everyone into this work,” Gast said. “We want to maximize this opportunity to take a step back and reflect on the purpose of the classification system, where it has fallen short, and how it has driven institutional behavior, and then be much more intentional about how we design the new classifications.”
One of the most significant changes to be made in a modernized version of the Carnegie Classifications released in early 2025, will be the revision of the Basic Classification. This category historically placed all colleges and universities into groups based on the highest degree awarded.
As an example of how limiting it is to organize institutions by only this single characteristic, under the old classification framework, institutions including Utah State University, Florida International University and Pennsylvania State University all have the same Carnegie Classification because the highest degree they award is the research doctorate (think Ph.D.s). But, other than their similarity with the highest degree awarded, these three institutions are incredibly different from one another. They differ in their student body demographic compositions, hundreds of millions of dollars in research funds separate each institution from the other, and the difference in the percentage of credentials awarded across degree categories (e.g., associates, bachelor’s, master’s) is significant.
The revised Basic Classification will be multi-dimensional and better reflect the richness and multifaceted nature of institutions and their learners. While the Carnegie Classifications team is still collecting feedback from higher education leaders and other stakeholders, an expanded list of organizing characteristics could include degree and certificate mix, size of the student body, location type, highest degree awarded, and transfer rates, among other factors.
“One of the limitations we see in the current classification system is its reliance on the highest degree awarded, which misses a bunch of what may be happening at a given institution and is not necessarily what makes two institutions alike. The purpose of this classification system is to organize institutions into groups of similar types or peers, and we think there may be better ways of doing that. That could mean looking at size or at the type of academic programs they offer, or at any number of other characteristics,” Gunja said. “That’s what we are gathering feedback on this spring. Ultimately, instead of a single characteristic, we imagine using more of a Myers-Briggs-like approach.”
The more dynamic classification framework may give researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders who are populating public dashboards, databases, or search tools to leverage information that makes it easier to understand how institutions compare – or contrast – with similarly situated peers.
“The reason we are taking on this work, and the reason ACE wanted to be involved in redesigning the Carnegie Classifications, is because they have an impact on institutional behavior,” said ACE President Ted Mitchell. “We want to modernize the system, lower the energy around the research classification chase, and ultimately point the Carnegie Classifications – and the sector as a whole – toward the students we serve and the outcomes they experience. If the classifications drive behavior, we want it to be behavior that benefits students.”
In addition to revisions to the Basic Classification, the ACE and Carnegie Foundation teams are working on a new Social and Economic Mobility Classification intended to give the public more information about the ways in which institutions are contributing to the long-term success of learners. The Social and Economic Mobility Classification will categorize institutions based on a variety of student characteristics and student outcomes. The new Social and Economic Mobility Classification could be complementary to other initiatives that have sought to increase transparency around the value of higher education such as the Postsecondary Value Commission Task Force led by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU).
“The postsecondary sector is clearly an extraordinarily powerful engine for social and economic opportunity. In the decade ahead, it must become even more so,” said Timothy Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation. “The Carnegie Classifications have an essential role to play. They have a substantial impact on public policy, institutional priorities, scholarship, and the allocation of capital. The changes underway will illuminate institutions’ contributions to social and economic mobility, creating new opportunities for learning and improvement. Ultimately, this work will be good for students, good for institutions of higher education, and good for the nation.”
While a 16-year-old’s version of organizing and categorizing colleges may forever be imperfect, the forthcoming changes to the Carnegie Classifications should ensure a more precise grouping of higher education institutions to better reflect their diverse and unique characteristics.
Alison Griffin is a Senior Vice President with Whiteboard Advisors, a social impact agency that helps entrepreneurs, donors and investors navigate the complex intersection of policy, the media and technology.