Carnegie Classification Revises Standards

By Hans Johnson

Revisions for 2000, which include scrapping evaluation of campuses’ admissions selectivity and levels of federal research funding, precede a more thorough overhaul scheduled for 2005, according to Alexander McCormick, senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation. The foundation will continue to use criteria such as the breadth of degrees institutions offer and the fields they cover to create its rankings.

While unwilling to talk about changes five years from now, McCormick gladly discusses the near-term alterations. "Our major motivation for this edition was that the last was done in 1994 based on data from 1989 to 1992," says McCormick. Since then, the nation’s strong economy and budget surpluses in several states have loosened the pinch on the purse strings at many campuses and ushered in a new era of private giving to some colleges and universities, altering their budget profiles and student enrollments.

And since the 1994 revisions, says McCormick, the foundation has become especially sensitive to "technical and philosophical" problems besetting its research, which underlies its rankings of individual schools. A major technical snarl facing the classification project, explains McCormick, was the need to discard a comprehensive gauge of research dollars once compiled by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Because the NSF now limits its data gathering to science and engineering, the Carnegie Foundation chose to abandon consideration of federal funding altogether in constructing its categories.

Still, it is the philosophical problems that McCormick seems most determined to address with the new classification, which compresses the scale’s two uppermost categories for "research" and "doctoral" universities into one. "The classification," he explains, "can be a powerful strategic objective for an institution," which may strive "to move from one [category] to another."

The classification remains the most widely recognized basis for comparing colleges and universities, with references to Carnegie status now common in campus conversations about how one institution compares with another. Conventional wisdom holds that the higher a school’s status in the Carnegie classification, the greater its prestige.

McCormick does not specify whether jockeying by schools in the now-merged top categories prompted the recent change. He simply notes that all drives for category promotion—akin to standardized exams’ inducement to teach for the test—hinder "invention and flexibility" by both faculty and administrators at campuses eager to climb in the rankings. Before the current revisions, some groups criticized the Carnegie Foundation for pegging its rankings too closely to receipt of federal research dollars instead of more qualitative factors such as teaching and service. While the 2000 revisions render most criticisms over research money moot, McCormick defends funding as "a well-defined and generally accepted proxy" for research activity. And he acknowledges that at Carnegie teaching and service "carry very little [weight] because there’s no way to measure them" and "no comparable benchmarks." McCormick urges faculty members and others interested in commenting on the 2000 revisions to send an e-mail message to classification@carnegie foundation.org.

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