The latest Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education is here, and there’s a new top category for colleges to strive for: “Opportunity Colleges and Universities.”
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The latest Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education is here, and there’s a new top category for colleges to strive for: “Opportunity Colleges and Universities.”
Carnegie analysts previously promised that this year’s revision would be “the biggest update” ever, and had already rolled out one aspect of their overhaul: their research labels. In the full revision published on Thursday, colleges got new core classifications based on their size and the degrees they most commonly bestow.
They also all got labels denoting whether they enroll underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities and Pell-eligible students at rates reflecting the geographic areas they draw from, and whether the students who attend — including those who don’t graduate — make more money than their peers. Those institutions whose numbers make them “higher access” and “higher earnings” are being branded by Carnegie as “Opportunity Colleges and Universities.”
The new classifications measure how colleges perform on “two key components of what we think is the social project of higher education: providing access to students who deserve it and providing them with a pathway to a strong, middle-class job and career,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education. ACE runs the classifications, along with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
“The Carnegie classifications, the old versions, you didn’t see students,” Mitchell said. “You saw money, you saw structure, but you didn’t see students. We want to put student success at the center of how institutions describe themselves and how others look at them.”
The previous classifications sorted colleges mostly by the highest degrees they offered, rather than the most common ones that graduates get. In addition, the Research-1 and Research-2 classifications — which only colleges with larger budgets could receive, because they required high spending on research — were more central to the system. Now, R1 and R2 still exist, and still require lots of research spending, but they’re framed as more of an extra label than part of the core system.
College leaders have often sought R1 and R2 statuses, despite Carnegie managers’ long insistence that the labels were not supposed to be goals, just neutral descriptions of what universities do.
“We’re trying to incentivize student success,” said Timothy Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. “We’re not trying to incentivize the allocation of large tranches of capital to research activity, even if that’s not in your institutional mission.”
The revision comes as the Trump administration attacks higher education with a rash of financial penalties, using research funding especially as leverage to force changes. While Carnegie’s new approach to sorting colleges isn’t a response to the White House (the first announcement that social and economic mobility would be incorporated came in 2022), they represent one response to the declining public trust in higher education that has helped make such attacks possible.
Will It Work?
Longtime higher-ed observers tended to feel either positive or neutral about the new basic classification, now called “institutional classification.” They weren’t convinced, however, that college leaders would stop wanting to reach higher levels of research classification. Those categories still bring colleges tangible benefits, including more funding. In addition, research is part of the sell for many universities, about the benefits they bring to society.
The Thurgood Marshall College Fund represents historically Black colleges, universities, and community colleges across the country. In developing their new formula, ACE leaders worked closely with Thurgood Marshall member institutions, said Harry L. Williams, the organization’s president. The new classifications give historically Black colleges credit for the work that they’re doing, Williams said — on both the research and student-success fronts. In the new classifications, Howard University is once again listed as an R1 institution, and many HBCUs are “higher access, higher earnings.”
But several high-profile historically Black universities, currently listed as R2s, are still seeking R1 status, and that’s a good thing, Williams said: “It will generate not only momentum for their campus but also potentially attract additional funding.” In addition, achieving higher research statuses is an issue of “equity and fairness” for historically Black institutions, he said, because they have always been underfunded and therefore less able to reach the top Carnegie research categories and get the benefits that come with that.
The Chronicle spoke with the heads of two “higher access, higher earnings” institutions, Tuskegee University, which is historically Black, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, which is not. Both talked about their research, in addition to their work on access and earnings.
Tuskegee University, a “professions-focused baccalaureate small” institution and a “research university” under the new system, is seeking to become an R2. “The reason schools want to achieve certain levels of research is for recognition of the research that they’re doing and for the ability to participate in certain programs,” said Mark Brown, the president. Some research grants require that the leading institutions on them are R1s or R2s.
The University of Illinois at Chicago has been an R1 since 1987. In her call with The Chronicle, Marie Lynn Miranda, the chancellor, mentioned her institution’s “half a billion dollars” in research spending right away. She wanted to emphasize that it was the combination of high research activity and social mobility for students that defined UIC: “That combination, to my mind, is really special.”
What Mitchell and his colleagues hope, however, is that college leaders will look to places like Tuskegee and UIC for lessons on how they may improve their own access and earnings labels.
Both Tuskegee and UIC focus on internships and experiential learning for students, which increases the chances they’ll land good jobs after leaving college, their leaders said. UIC has internal funding for faculty members to hire undergraduate researchers, in case they don’t have external grants to do so. At Tuskegee, students are required to complete at least one internship in their field of study — which Brown saw as the modern-day counterpart to the college’s historical requirement, from its founding, that students work on constructing campus buildings over the summer. (The college’s science, technology, engineering, and math focus probably also helps with the earnings metric, he added.)
For recruiting underrepresented minority and low-income students, Miranda pointed to partnerships with Chicago Public Schools; Chicago’s community-college system; and youth organizations such as Boys & Girls Clubs. Brown said Tuskegee’s admissions officers emphasize the university’s return on investment.
The Chronicle also contacted a half-dozen colleges that Carnegie is now labeling as “lower access, lower earnings.” Only one person agreed to speak on the record: Wayne D. Lewis, president of Houghton University.
Lewis didn’t agree with the idea that Houghton is “lower access.” He pointed to a scholarship the university has to cover tuition fully for Pell Grant recipients. Indeed, Houghton does well on Carnegie’s low-income-enrollment metric. The university also has scholarships for students who undertake Christian service and for the children of missionaries and pastors in the Wesleyan Church, whose families tend to be lower income.
Houghton has a strong Christian identity, which brings Lewis to another point of contention with the Carnegie methodology. A disproportionate number of Houghton graduates go on missions or enter ministries after graduation. “Those typically are not positions that pay very well, but they align with the callings that students have on their lives,” Lewis said.
As for the numbers of underrepresented racial minorities Houghton enrolls — the reason the university has a “lower access” designation — Lewis said he was “proud” of the college’s racial diversity. (People who identify as Hispanic, Black, American Indian, Pacific Islander, or mixed race make up 16 percent of the student body. According to Carnegie’s calculations, Houghton should enroll 34 percent underrepresented minority students, based on the makeup of the top states that supply Houghton with students, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.) Lewis took issue with the Carnegie Classification, or any outside organization, deciding what the university’s demographic profile should be. “The public has the expectation that a classification system is a values-neutral categorization of the type of institution that a college or university is,” he said. “That clearly is not what they’ve ventured into with their access methodology.”
Indeed, the revision aims to articulate a new set of values. Mitchell talked about wanting to “create a new narrative of how higher education should be evaluated in the world” and how, “in order to restore confidence in higher education, whether in the White House or on Main Street, we need to do Job One, and Job One is providing a path to student success.”
