Beyond ‘Prestige’: New Carnegie Classification Focuses on Student Success

As widespread public skepticism about the value of a degree persists, a new institutional classification system recognizes colleges and universities that afford all types of students the opportunity to access an education and earn competitive wages thereafter. It’s the latest update to the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, which has also spent the past few years retooling its decades-old framework for categorizing colleges and universities.

“We want this to be and be seen as higher education holding itself accountable for ensuring student access and success,” Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said in an interview with Inside Higher Ed. “We don’t think we can convince the American public of the value of higher education unless we can first convince them that they have access to high-quality education that will propel them along in their version of the American dream.”

That goal guided ACE and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s revamping of the long-standing Basic Classification—now called the Institutional Classification—and the development of a new Student Access and Earnings Classification, both of which were unveiled Thursday. Though plans for the latter, student success–oriented framework were first announced in 2022, the inaugural set of designations was just released.

Four hundred and seventy-nine institutions—including community colleges, public universities, religious colleges and specialized colleges—achieved a new “opportunity” designation, signifying both high levels of access and strong economic outcomes for students.

The announcement comes two months after ACE and Carnegie shared changes to the metrics for evaluating an institution for Research-1 status, which previously relied on a complex, opaque formula that could incentivize institutions to compete against each other in pursuit of prestige even if it compromised their core mission. As of February, however, obtaining Research-1 status is dependent on just two criteria: spending at least $50 million total on annual research and awarding at least 70 research doctorates a year. Under those guidelines, 40 new institutions received a Research-1 designation this year, making them more competitive for federal grants and recruiting top students and faculty. A new category also recognizes smaller colleges and universities for conducting research.

Now, the revamped Institutional Classification system—which makes it easier to compare like colleges—and the Student Access and Earnings Classification are incentivizing institutions to focus on their student success missions, too.

“The research designation had taken on this extra weight and importance, and left out a whole bunch of institutions that were really just focused on if they were moving young people to economic opportunity,” said Timothy Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation. “The access and earnings classifications will elevate those institutions and amplify those and create an opportunity to learn what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.”

‘Continuous Improvement’

While the former Basic Classification relied on the highest degree an institution awards, even if that reflected a small portion of the institution, the new Institutional Classification system uses multiple characteristics, including size, degree types awarded and fields of study, to group institutions into 31 categories. And since institutions are grouped with peers sharing similar characteristics across those dimensions, it prevents dissimilar institutions from landing in the same category—one of the problems with the old metrics.

“We’re not going to compare the Rhode Island School of Design to the California Institute of Technology,” Mitchell, of ACE, said. “We’re going to compare RISD to other special-purpose institutions that focus on art and design. That gives us an opportunity to create comparison sets that will be meaningful to the institutions themselves and help create a cycle of continuous improvement.”

Building on those groupings, ACE and the Carnegie Foundation are also using data from the College Scorecard, the Census Bureau and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System to compare financial accessibility and earning potential of graduates at peer institutions, while adjusting for geographic wage differences. The new Student Access and Earnings Classification considers geographically contextualized criteria including percentage of undergraduates who received Pell Grants, percentage of underrepresented minority students and median earnings of students working and not enrolled eight years after entry.

Those colleges and universities that have higher-than-expected ratios of access and earnings compared to the entire population of the region are designated as Opportunity Colleges and Universities. While there are numerous higher education and economic mobility calculators already available, the contextualized, location-specific methodology behind the access and earnings classification sets this system apart.

“Most of the social and economic mobility rankings out there just input raw values without adjusting either for institutional type or geography,” said Mushtaq Gunja, executive director of the Carnegie Classification Systems and senior vice president of ACE. “That’s a mistake, because what $35,000 means in Brownsville, Tex., is very different from what $35,000 means in New York City, and yet the existing rankings treated it as if it’s mostly the same.”

Timothy Renick, executive director of the National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State University, said showing “that selectivity and impact may be two entirely different things” make the classifications “a significant step forward” in measuring institutional success.

“They provide a new (if imperfect) way to track economic mobility at scale,” Renick said in an email. “All of these new approaches will rightfully be debated and challenged, but the field will be better for a public discussion in which measures of access and student success, specifically economic impact, finally appear alongside metrics such as research output.”

Models of Success

Based on the new metrics, nearly 500 institutions were designated as Opportunity Colleges and Universities. ACE and Carnegie say they serve as models “for studying how campuses can foster student success.”

Numerous campuses within the California State University system, where about 42 percent of students receive a Pell Grant and two-thirds of students graduate debt-free, earned the designation.

“We’re educating the new majority of America: students of color, students with disabilities, first-generation students, low-income students and adults who are upskilling, reskilling or going to college for the first time,” Mildred García, chancellor of the CSU system, told Inside Higher Ed. “This new Carnegie classification is recognizing the work that’s being done by our campuses, faculty and staff in moving people from lower socioeconomic status to the middle class and beyond.”

Utah Valley University was also classified as an opportunity university. Close to half of its students are first generation, 36 percent are Pell recipients and about 20 percent are underrepresented minorities. Yet eight years after enrolling, former students earn about $50,000 a year—well above the $29,000 that is the median earnings of a similar population in the locations where students are from.

Kyle Reyes, vice president for institutional advancement at Utah Valley, said he attributes the university’s high ROI for students to the institution’s long-term investment in student success initiatives—and an unwillingness to deviate from its original mission as a broad-access institution. Some of those efforts have included partnerships with K-12 schools; helping students fill out federal financial aid applications; offering scholarships; academic advising; a food pantry; low-cost, on-campus childcare; student research opportunities; paid internships; and completion grants for returning students.

Utah Valley University

But that doesn’t mean Utah Valley, which first launched as a small technical college in the 1940s and eventually became a university in 2008, hasn’t had to resist temptation to chase the Research-1 Classification and all the academic prestige that has historically accompanied it.

“When we became a university in 2008, we had a whole host of people telling us we should climb the rankings and all we’d need to do is limit admissions,” Reyes said. “But that’s not who we are. That’s not our mission. So we didn’t lean into those incentives. That was always frustrating, because even though we’d get a pat on the head for what we’re doing, at the end of the day they’d tout the more prestigious universities.”

Recognition as an affordable pathway to economic stability through the new classification system is both “validating” for Utah Valley and a “game-changer” for all of higher education, he said.

“For so long, the incentives were for exclusion, prestige, lower admission rates and higher test scores, even though on the ground we knew the masses weren’t being served by that model,” Reyes said.

Now, he added, this “also has to be something that’s accepted broadly by folks who believe the incentives and funding should follow.”