Tag: Classifications

  • Carnegie Classifications debuts redesign of system to group colleges

    Carnegie Classifications debuts redesign of system to group colleges

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    The American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching on Thursday released updates to the Carnegie Classifications, including a redesigned system to describe institutions and a new category to identify colleges that boost student access and earnings. 

    For the system’s basic classifications, colleges were previously grouped together based on the highest degree they awarded — a method that “fell short of adequately describing the full scope of activity on campuses across the country,” according to the announcement. 

    The basic classifications — renamed the institutional classifications — now group colleges together based on multiple characteristics, such as their size, the types of degrees they confer, and the fields of study they offer. For instance, the classifications will distinguish between institutions mostly focused on graduate education and those that offer a mix of bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees. 

    Colleges will also be grouped together by size: Those with under 4,000 students will be classified as small, those with over 20,000 students will be considered large, and those in between will be considered medium. Additionally, colleges will be grouped together by their academic program mix, such as whether they primarily award pre-professional degrees. 

    The updated list has been highly anticipated ever since ACE and the Carnegie Foundation announced they were overhauling the Carnegie Classifications in 2023 to better reflect the diversity of college missions. 

    “With this redesign of the Carnegie Classifications, we set out to measure what matters,” Mushtaq Gunja, executive director of the Carnegie Classification systems and senior vice

    president at ACE, said in a statement. “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.”

    The system also debuted its new Student Access and Earnings Classification. This designation seeks to measure whether colleges are enrolling students reflective of the regions they serve and how well they are preparing them for the job market. 

    To calculate this, it examines the share of undergraduates receiving Pell Grants and those from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds, along with alumni earnings eight years after enrollment. Researchers then compare these metrics to the demographics of the regions colleges serve.

    This classification groups colleges based on their access and whether their former students have relatively higher or lower earnings compared to their regional peers. 

    Colleges with higher access and earnings are designated Opportunity Colleges and Universities. 

    Nearly 500 colleges earned this designation. The group includes a wide variety of institutions, including historically Black colleges like Howard University, in Washington, D.C., and large public universities such as Stony Brook University, in New York. 

    Meanwhile, colleges that provide lower access but higher earnings contain all eight universities that make up the Ivy League, as well as other prestigious colleges, such as Stanford University. This group also included state flagships such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Florida. 

    ACE and the Carnegie Foundation also updated their research designations, releasing their new list of research institutions under the revised metrics in February. The changes resulted in a sharp uptick in the number of institutions that earned the coveted R1 status, denoting the highest levels of research activity.

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  • Which colleges gained R1 status under the revamped Carnegie Classifications?

    Which colleges gained R1 status under the revamped Carnegie Classifications?

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    The American Council on Education on Thursday released the latest list of research college designations under the revamped Carnegie Classifications, labeling 187 institutions as Research 1 institutions. 

    The coveted R1 designation is given to universities with the highest levels of research activity. The number of colleges designated as R1 institutions in 2025 rose 28% compared with the last time the list was released, in 2022. 

    The updated list of research institutions is the first that ACE and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching have released since they updated their methodology for the classifications. The new methodology was created in part to simplify a previously complex formula that left institutions fearful about losing their status. 

    “We hope this more modernized version of Carnegie Classifications will answer more questions in a more sophisticated way about institutions and their position in the ecosystem and will allow decisions to be made much more precisely by philanthropists, by governments, and by students and families,” Ted Mitchell, president of ACE, told Higher Ed Dive.

    Thirty-two institutions moved from the second-highest research level in 2022 — commonly called Research 2, or R2 — to the R1 designation. That group includes Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C. The private college — which announced a record $122 million in research grants and contracts in 2022 — is the only HCBU with the designation. 

    Other colleges that moved from R2 to R1 include public institutions like the University of Idaho, University of North Dakota, University of Rhode Island, University of Vermont and the University of Wyoming, along with private colleges like Lehigh University, in Pennsylvania, and American University, in Washington, D.C. 

    Just one institution dropped from R1 to R2 status — the University of Alabama in Huntsville. 

    For universities to achieve R1 status under the new methodology, they must spend an average of $50 million on research and development each year and award 70 or more research doctorates. 

    R2 institutions need to spend an average of $5 million per year on research and award 20 or more research doctorates. 

    Previously, the methodology was more complex. In order to keep the R1 and R2 groups of equal size, classifiers determined the line between the two designations with each cycle. They also looked at 10 different variables to determine R1 status. 

    “The previous methodology was opaque and I think led institutions to spend more time trying to figure out what the methodology actually was, perhaps distracting them from more important work,” said Timothy Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation. “Institutions that are close to the bar will just be much clearer about what they have to do to get over the bar.”

    The latest crop of R1 institutions have each spent $748.4 million on research and development on average annually from fiscal 2021 to fiscal 2023. During that same period, they have annually awarded an average of 297 research doctorates. 

    Texas led the list of states with the most R1 institutions, with 16. California and New York followed closely behind with 14 and 12 institutions, respectively. 

    The 139 R2 institutions on this latest list each spent an average of $55.17 million annually over three years on research and development — just beating the threshold for R1 status. However, they produced an average of only 49 research doctorates per year. 

    This year also marks the first time the classifications have included a new designation: RCU, or research colleges and universities. The new category is meant to recognize institutions that regularly conduct research but don’t confer doctoral degrees. These colleges only need to spend more than an average of $2.5 million annually on research to be recognized as RCUs. 

    This year, 215 colleges and universities have reached that status. Many are master’s- and baccalaureate-level institutions. And some are four-year colleges with a “special focus,” such as medical schools and centers. 

    Two tribal colleges have also reached RCU status: Diné College, in Arizona, and Northwest Indian College, in Washington.

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