New Basic Carnegie Classifications

The new Carnegie Classification system of higher education institutions is now in use on economicdiversity.org. The new classifications were released in February 2006, and increased the total number of classifications from 18 to 33. Thirteen of these additions are for Associate’s colleges. One addition was made to the Research category, one addition was made to the Master’s category, and Other Technology replaced Teachers College in the Special Focus category.

One significant change is that the new Basic Carnegie Classification is based on a single year of data instead of three-year averages. The most current data available for all institutions through 2004 was used. The update cycle has yet to be decided, but it is expected to be more frequent than in the past. The Basic Classifications will be used in the 2007 publication of U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of “America’s Best Colleges.”

On economicdiversity.org, we have created shorter labels for the Basic Classifications so that they can be displayed more easily on institutional profiles and data tables. We have also added “Carnegie” as a criteria when choosing institutions for comparison.