A New Way of Classifying Colleges Elates Some and Perturbs Others

Carnegie groupings de-emphasize research and seek to discourage ranking of institutions

By JULIANNE BASINGER

What do Boston College, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of Idaho have in common?

Not much. But in the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's latest classification of American higher education, released this week, all three appear in the same "Doctoral Extensive" category. That's evidence to some college experts that the new system has flaws.

The sweeping revision of the classification emphasizes teaching, focusing on the number

ALSO SEE: Database: Carnegie Foundation's Classification of 3,856 Institutions of Higher Education Table: A Comparison of the 1994 and 2000 Classifications Chart: Proportion of Institutions by Carnegie Classification, 2000 How the Classification Was Developed: Text of the Category Definitions

and type of degrees an institution awards, rather than research or selectivity in admissions. Carnegie also has made changes to some of the categories, including a consolidation of its groupings for institutions that grant doctoral degrees. The foundation's main goals in the restructuring: broadening the system's emphasis beyond research funds, and discouraging its use as a way to rank colleges.

About 640 colleges and universities changed categories in the new classification, compared with the last one, done six years ago. The changes delighted some college leaders, who thought that the new system placed greater value on their institutions' focus on teaching, and dismayed others, who believed that Carnegie's categorization didn't match their vision of their institutions' identity. Some colleges have asked to have their classifications changed; Carnegie has made dozens of shifts and is considering others.

Some education scholars also argued that the new system blurs institutional differences, diminishing its usefulness as a research tool -- the purpose it was created three decades ago to serve. Institutions over the years have come to view the system as one measure of their identity, and the classification also is used by U.S. News & World Report as a starting point for its annual college rankings.

Foundation officials acknowledged that the new groupings have flaws, but they consider the Carnegie Classification 2000 an interim step toward an overhaul of the entire system in 2005.

"It wouldn't really be hard for someone to get other data to create more-relevant distinctions," said Alexander C. McCormick, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation who supervised the project. "Our 2005 edition will have a much more flexible system to bring together the different dimensions of institutions."

Carnegie did the interim work this year because the information used in the last classification, in 1994, is "way out of date," Mr. McCormick added.

Since 1994, the number of colleges and universities has increased from about 3,600 to 3,856. Some 500 institutions are new to this year's classification, including 377 that specialize in associate-level programs. Among those, about 215 are for-profit two-year colleges.

About 195 institutions were dropped from the listing because they closed, merged, or lost their accreditation.

The foundation, based in Menlo Park, Calif., created the classification in 1970 to group institutions by their academic missions and to serve as a research tool for scholars of higher education. Since then, the categories have undergone several revisions, but none as substantial as those announced by the foundation last fall for this year's classification (The Chronicle, November 5, 1999).

Carnegie officials, particularly the foundation's president since 1997, Lee S. Shulman, were concerned that the categories had come to be seen as a ranking system for colleges. In some cases, that trend had led presidents and governing boards to adopt "moving up in the Carnegie Classification" as an institutional goal. The foundation's leaders also worried that the categories had come to weigh institutions' research activities too heavily, at the expense of other aspects of their missions, such as teaching and service, Mr. McCormick said.

Foundation officials also were concerned that changes in how the National Science Foundation reports data on federal grants to colleges would make it difficult to compare an institution's research activity to that in previous years. Mr. McCormick said the foundation wants the 2005 classification system, which is still being developed, to allow institutions to appear in several categories. That innovation, he said, would more accurately describe colleges' identity and activities, including the spectrum of their research, which might not necessarily be reflected solely by the amount of federal grants they attract.

The biggest change in this year's classification is for universities that award doctoral degrees, and not surprisingly, most of the shifts between categories occurred in that group. The former system had four categories that mainly based distinctions between research and doctoral institutions on the amount of federal research grants they drew annually.

The new system divides those institutions into only two categories, based solely on the number of degrees awarded in a given number of disciplines. Institutions that confer 50 doctorates a year in at least 15 disciplines are listed as Doctoral Extensive, while those that grant at least 10 doctorates annually in three or more disciplines are categorized as Doctoral Intensive.

The proportion of all institutions that fall into the two new categories is only slightly larger than the share that was in the previous four categories: about 6.8 percent, compared with 6.4 percent in 1994. Yet some colleges made significant jumps between categories, due both to expansions of their degree offerings and to the category criteria of the new system.

Most universities previously classified as Research I, like Caltech, moved into the new Doctoral Extensive category. Nineteen institutions that were Doctoral I in 1994, like Boston College, and five that were Doctoral II, are now Doctoral Extensive. Thirty-seven universities that were Research II in 1994, like the University of Idaho, also now are Doctoral Extensive.

The changes won praise from officials at some institutions. Ann Weaver Hart, the provost at Claremont Graduate University, which moved from the Doctoral I category to Doctoral Extensive, sent an e-mail message praising the news to the university's faculty and students.

"The new category emphasizes education, so it puts us with institutions that have both research and education missions, rather than research only," she said in an interview. "I'm pleased, because I think it's a shift from a decades-long trend to give more emphasis to research."

But some education researchers were less than enthusiastic about the changes. "The 2000 reclassification entails a significant blurring of very real and significant distinctions between institutions," said Jack H. Schuster, a professor of education and public policy at Claremont. The grouping of Boston College, Caltech, and Idaho in the same category illustrates that loss of focus, he said. "They're very different, and there needs to be a way to more finely delineate between types of institutions."

Boston College is a Catholic institution offering an array of doctoral degrees, Caltech is a nonsectarian institution with a focus on hard-science research, and the University of Idaho is a public institution with some research programs, particularly in nuclear energy and mining.

Collapsing the four previous categories for doctoral institutions into two will create problems for researchers who want to assess changes in higher education over time, Mr. Schuster said. Although Carnegie had revised its categories in previous years, it was still possible to compare over time.

"It was, with all of its imperfections, reasoned enough and adequately reflective enough of realities on the ground that it could be used by all researchers, who could then offer their own critiques and qualifications to the scheme," Mr. Schuster said.

"In a way, we now have to start from scratch or develop alternate classification measures, and with a variety of people doing that, the possibility of doing comparative research really becomes much more difficult."

Presidents of some baccalaureate colleges also were dismayed by the new classification. The old system used an institution's admissions selectivity as a factor in classifying colleges into two baccalaureate categories. Carnegie officials thought that factor had helped foster the notion that the classification was a ranking system -- a notion they wanted to dispel. So they created three new categories for baccalaureate colleges, based not on selectivity in admissions but on the number and types of degrees they award.

Dozens of institutions that had been classified as baccalaureate colleges in 1994 are now listed as master's institutions, either because they have added programs or because of the new categories' criteria.

Many presidents of liberal-arts colleges were upset to learn that because they offered one or two master's-degree programs, they would no longer be classified as baccalaureate, liberal-arts colleges, said Julianne Still Thrift, president of Salem College, in North Carolina. "This thing has been a real problem for us," she said.

Her institution initially was listed as Master's II in the new classification, because it offers a single master's program in education. But the college considers itself a liberal-arts, baccalaureate institution, and persuaded Carnegie to change the listing to that, Ms. Thrift said. "It more accurately reflects what we are: our mission, our programs, and our faculty focus."

Goucher College, in Maryland, has a similar complaint about being classified as a Master's II institution, and has asked Carnegie to reconsider, said Robert S. Welch, the college's interim president. "It has to do with how we view ourselves and how we think it would be appropriate for the world to view us," he said.

The University of Redlands, in California, which in 1994 was deemed a Master's I university, found itself listed in the new classification as a Specialized Institution, because it offers many business degrees. "We just thought that was erroneous, because it doesn't represent our institution," said Philip A. Glotzbach, the vice president for academic affairs.

He asked Carnegie to reconsider its listing, and the foundation agreed to restore Redlands to the Master's I category.

Redlands also was concerned about how the new listing would affect its position in college-ranking systems like those done by U.S. News. "Like everyone else, we have ambivalence about the U.S. News rankings," Mr. Glotzbach said. "But no school likes to drop out of a ranking that has previously regarded the school well."

Peter Cary, the special-projects editor at U.S. News, said the magazine used the 1994 Carnegie system for this year's rankings, which will be published in September. "We'll be looking at whether we need to make adjustments for next year," he said.

Carnegie's Mr. McCormick emphasized that the classifications released this week are preliminary, and that the foundation will continue in the coming months to seek comment from institutions and make changes. "We didn't anticipate the degree of upset over the preliminary results," he said. "So with a lot of these, we have provisionally moved them because there seems to be some merit to their argument."

People seeking further information on the new classification or the 2005 changes can read more on Carnegie's Web site (http://www.carnegiefoundation.org).

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