Who Moved Up — and Down — in the New Carnegie Classifications?

The desire to move up is endemic in higher education. So the most recent update of the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, released in December 2021 for a public-review period, reveals a much hoped-for outcome for some colleges.

Initially, nine universities were to join the highest level of research institutions in the updated list, produced by the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University’s School of Education, and last updated in 2018. Among the new members of this group of “Doctoral/Very High Research” institutions at the time were Baylor, Old Dominion, and Utah State Universities, and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

But the group, known colloquially as “R1,” was also poised to lose three members: Brandeis University, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. They were initially to be reclassified as “Doctoral/High Research,” or R2.

In February 2022, however, at the end of the six-week period during which data corrections took place and colleges could appeal, some of the proposed reclassifications were reversed. The final release of the classifications revealed that the trio of universities that were to be bumped to R2 instead remained among Research 1 institutions. In addition, six more universities joined the R1 group, which now numbers 146: the Colorado School of Mines, Ohio University, the University of Alabama at Huntsville, the University of Maine, the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and the University of Montana.

The doctoral classification also includes “Doctoral/Professional” institutions, a group that had added 68 colleges when the revisions were finalized. Most of them were formerly classified as master’s institutions. In 2018 there were 407 doctoral institutions of all types, compared with 469 in the update finalized in February.

The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education developed the classifications more than 40 years ago as a way to distinguish institutions for educational-research purposes. The system, which in 2021 categorized about 3,900 two- and four-year colleges, is now widely seen as a ladder to climb. In part, that’s because classifications are used by funding agencies and are also the basis for the categories of annual rankings by publications such as U.S. News & World Report.

Explore the table below to see the colleges that moved into — or out of — the three categories of doctoral institutions: