I have watched with great interest over the decades as various colleges have jockeyed to rise in the Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Learning. Some even explicitly state in their strategic plans that their goal is to advance to the next Carnegie level. It is often a worthwhile aspiration because striving for a higher classification can help an institution focus its energy and resources on becoming more complex and sophisticated.
For colleges that successfully make the leap, a higher Carnegie level can have substantial positive consequences. I served on the faculty of a university that in the 1980s advanced — quite deliberately — from Research II to Research I status, categories in Carnegie’s classification system at the time. Years later I helped lead another university to advance to the next Carnegie level. The prestige and material benefits that the new designations brought to both institutions were immediately apparent. Those advantages are why so many other institutions are making the same push.
While you may gain prestige, grant money, and talented researchers, be prepared for high costs and steep competition – and make sure your goals align with your values.
A university that moves up will very likely enjoy, for example, an enhanced ability to attract external research grants. It will also look more appealing to industry partners who are considering engaging in joint research-and-development projects. Other benefits include more leverage to negotiate a higher rate of reimbursement for the overhead costs that come with receiving federal grants and an improved ability to inspire donors to invest in institutional projects.
What’s more, a higher status improves a university’s ability to recruit high-quality faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. It can also provide a justification for raising faculty pay, because many faculty-salary comparisons, such as Oklahoma State University’s respected “Faculty Salary Survey by Discipline,” employ the Carnegie Classifications as a way of sorting salary levels.
All of these factors in turn help the institution to generate more research and more- sophisticated research. An institution’s Carnegie status can also enhance its graduates’ attractiveness to prospective employers and to respected graduate and professional schools.
The Carnegie Classifications have become so associated with prestige that they are the cause of great competition and envy among institutions, as traditional rivals attempt to position themselves for higher placement. In fact, the Carnegie system has come to play such an important role that, starting this year, classification updates will happen every three years instead of every five, which had been the case since 2000. This shorter cycle will allow the classification system to keep up with the increasing number of institutions that are seeking to change their status.
Needless to say, rising to a new level can come at a considerable cost. The classifications themselves are based on research activity, numbers of graduate programs, numbers of graduate degrees awarded, and other factors, all of which can represent a sizable investment for many universities.
The classification system was developed to describe colleges, not to rank them.
Of course, advancing in the classification system might not be the right move for every institution. Chasing a new Carnegie level could potentially lead to mission creep. A college that understands its core mission to be teaching and community service might consider scholarly research to be a lower priority. Suddenly placing substantial emphasis on research productivity could cause the college to lose sight of its identity and what made it unique.
That being said, the effort to rise to a new level in the Carnegie Classifications is generally a positive move for most colleges. It encourages them to aspire to new heights and to reach levels of productivity that they might not have attempted otherwise.
It is important to point out that while many in higher education talk about “rising to the next Carnegie level,” as I have here, the Carnegie Foundation — which administered the classification system until 2014, when it transferred responsibility to Indiana University’s Center for Postsecondary Research — itself did not view its framework as a hierarchy or a ranking. The classification system was developed for the express purpose of describing institutional diversity, not to rank one institution over and against another. It describes an institution according to its undergraduate and graduate instructional programs, its enrollment and undergraduate profiles, its size and setting, and — the category that receives so much attention — its basic research classification.
Nevertheless, the system classifies institutions of higher education from the smallest, associate-level colleges to the most complex research universities. In doing so, it establishes a valuable continuum on which an institution can assess its complexity and academic diversity. It also provides a useful road map for institutions that aspire to new levels of sophistication. In an environment where resources are so scarce and competition for faculty members and students is so fierce, we shouldn’t be surprised if there are calls in the future for the classification updates to come even more often.
Gary A. Olson is president of Daemen College.
