The Next Update of the Carnegie Classification Will Be Its Biggest Yet

What’s New

The next Carnegie classifications of colleges, due in the spring of 2025, will label colleges by whether they’re low or high access, and whether students earn low or high incomes after they leave. This will be the first time that the closely watched classifications will consider who goes to a college and the college’s student outcomes.

The change “will give folks that use these classifications a smarter way of thinking about which institutions are doing a good job of serving students,” said Mushtaq Gunja, executive director of the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.

The classifications are revised every few years, but Gunja is billing the 2025 version as “the biggest update since the classifications were first released in 1973,” for changes including the mobility measure and others.

The access-outcome label, which the Carnegie Classification staff is calling their “social- and economic-mobility classification,” may look something like the following graphic, with individual institutions falling into one of four boxes.

“The low-access, low-outcome institutions are definitely institutions we would like to see improve,” Gunja said.

The Backdrop

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Council on Education, which together sponsor the Carnegie Classification, had previously announced the basic outlines for its 2025 overhaul.

The basic classification, which every U.S. college gets, is simplifying drastically. A college’s research activity will no longer be part of the basic classification. Instead, a research label will only apply to those colleges that conduct a lot of research. And Carnegie Classification is adding the “social- and economic-mobility” label to every college.

The classifications are a big deal for many colleges that explicitly say they plan to try to be labeled as “R1” institutions, denoting high research activity. That’s despite the fact that Carnegie Classification analysts have long said college leaders should not attempt to change their classification if doing so is contrary to their institutional missions. Analysts have rolled out recent revisions in an attempt to disincentivize this classification-climbing, and to better describe the many different kinds of colleges that exist in the United States, they say.

The Details

Gunja and Sara Gast, deputy executive director at Carnegie Classification, say they’re still working out the details about what the 2025 basic and social- and economic-mobility classifications will look like. They’ve released some information about the social- and economic-mobility classification in hopes of getting feedback from colleges and other experts.

For now, they’re thinking of measuring “access” by the percent of a college’s student body that is eligible for Pell grants and the racial makeup of the student body, adjusted for the racial balance of the area the college serves. They plan to define “outcome” as college-goers’ earnings, whether or not they graduate. Earnings, too, are adjusted for race — reflecting inequities in the labor market — and for the community the college serves. So a college that serves a rural area with a low cost of living will have a lower bar for earnings than a college in a large, high-earning city.

Gast and Gunja are also deciding between having four categories, as shown in the graphic above, or having nine categories, which would add “average” to the adjectives in front of “access” and “outcomes.”

Gunja took pains to describe why the Carnegie classifications are not a ranking and how they may work better than rankings. The classified colleges are not supposed to try to move up any kind of ranking. But if they do find themselves in a box with poorer access or outcomes, they can look to a better box for lessons and inspiration.