The Carnegie Classifications - profiles in change - classification of institutions of higher education

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, Feb, 2001 by Jennifer C. Patterson

As the world of higher education changes, so do our ways of describing it. For nearly 30 years, the college and university community has looked to the Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education for those descriptions.

But as the role of government research funding decreases and change in higher education increases, classifications must also evolve. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching periodically revises the classifications, which it began publishing in 1973. Now the classifications are in their fourth edition, and plans are in the works for future revisions to keep this higher-education sorting tool sharp.

Understanding the Change

Alexander McCormick is senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation, the organization that establishes the Carnegie Classifications. He explained to Matrix that the classifications were designed to change continually to accurately reflect the nature of higher education at the time. "Institutions change; they are not static entities. If [the classifications] were frozen in time, it would not reflect changes in the universe of higher education," he said.

The Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education originated in 1970 and was published as part of the 1971 report "New Students and New Places." It was published independently in 1973 and billed as a way to classify institutions by function and by characteristics of the students and faculty. It was subsequently revised in 1987 and 1994.

The classifications "were designed as a research tool," McCormick said. At the time of its original publication, then-commissioner Clark Kerr described the classification's purpose: "We thought it would be helpful to many individuals and organizations that are engaged in research on higher education."

Indeed, many people found the classifications helpful. In their easy-to-understand format that made the world of higher education comprehensible to professional and casual observer alike, the classifications became the most common way of quickly describing an institution's size and focus. The system was used, not just by researchers, but by policy makers, funding agencies, institutional leaders, the media, and the general public.

Along the way, however, people started to use the classifications in ways that deviated from their original purpose. While they continue to be used to assist in research, colleges, universities, and other interested parties are increasingly looking to the classifications as a system of ranking institutions, a practice that does not please the Carnegie Foundation.

"It is the source of some discomfort for us when they are used [as rankings]. We see it as an inappropriate use," McCormick said. This discomfort played a role in deciding to update the classification system. "[There was a] consciousness of the perception [of the classifications] as a ranking and the role it was playing in shaping institutional aspirations," McCormick said. He cited reports of schools that set changing their Carnegie Classification as a goal, a process sometimes referred to as "moving up the Carnegie Classifications".

In some ways, this is a limitation of any classification system that uses a list of categories. It may be particularly tempting to use the Carnegie Classifications as a ranking system because it lists the categories from the largest doctoral and research institutions down through the associate's-degree-granting and smaller specialty institutions. "We considered changing the order" to lessen the temptation to use the system as a ranking, McCormick said. But the foundation ultimately decided to "maintain the structure of the classification as designed in 1973."

No current plan attempts to stop people from using the classifications as rankings, but the future strategy of using multiple categories may have the effect of discouraging that use. The desire to avoid use as a ranking system is not the only, or even the primary, reason that the foundation chose to update the classifications. Another important part of the catalyst for change came when the foundation discovered that its data reflecting research activity was becoming inconsistent.

The foundation had relied upon data from the National Science Foundation to reflect federal support for research activities. But, when the NSF modified its reporting to include only science and engineering research, the data available to the Carnegie Foundation, which does not do its own data collection, was uneven.

McCormick said the foundation also had grown "dissatisfied with using a single figure as a proxy for research activity." By using this single piece of data, the foundation realized that it was only measuring a school's dependence on federal monies for research, ignoring private sources of research support. Using this figure also ignored the "pass through" of funds, in which a single school receives a federal grant but parcels the money out to its collaborators and partner institutions to complete a project, a severe limitation when measuring research activity. The change in data available from NSF was the final factor that caused the Carnegie Foundation to reexamine its historical use of research funding to help classify institutions.