For over half a century, the Carnegie Classification, housed under the American Council of Education, has been considered the standard for categorizing postsecondary schools. Many ranking systems, including the U.S. News and World Report, use the framework to calculate the value of different universities. However, in recent years, the ACE, in partnership with the Carnegie Foundation, decided to redesign its classification system.
“We need a new social contract between the American people and higher (education) institutions focused on outcomes, on results, (on) student success,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the ACE.
Mitchell sat down with Timothy Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation, as part of a featured session at the South by Southwest Education Conference on Monday, March 9, to discuss the intention behind the new classification method.
According to a SXSW EDU press release, the framework “will now determine institutional excellence not simply on prestige, student selectivity or degrees awarded, but on how well schools set their students up for success in the real world.”
During the session, titled “Redefining Success: A New Social Contract for Higher Ed,” Mitchell said the original Carnegie system did not contain a measurement of student outcomes or reflect the goals of certain colleges.
“I was hearing from them, ‘The Carnegie Classifications really aren’t accurate,’” Mitchell said. “‘They’re not representing what I do, what our mission is. We really need a different set of metrics.’”
Knowles said the new framework uses salaries and employment data of graduates as a measure of student outcomes. Results are visualized in a chart comparing alumni earnings with the college’s level of accessibility for underrepresented student groups. UT-Austin and Texas A&M University both meet the “lower access, high earnings” criteria, meaning they accept a low number of minority students and students with a lower socioeconomic status. Simultaneously, their graduates earn high wages.
UT-El Paso and UT-RGV ranked among the nearly 500 “higher access, high earnings” institutions. Mitchell said no “celebrity” universities, such as Stanford or Harvard, met that criterion.
“We’re finding that the attention of America is probably in the wrong place,” Mitchell said. “We should be looking at those (478) institutions that are doing the right thing for students.”
Mitchell said these measurements break the myth that some universities promote regarding student success.
“Celebrity institutions … have created a narrative that the way you get to results is through selectivity,” Knowles said. “These 478 institutions are proving precisely the opposite, that you can get to results by opening doors.”
Looking forward, Mitchell said college admissions processes must be overhauled and use alternative student metrics that better reflect nuances in education.
“The admissions process is, no doubt, opaque,” Mitchellsaid. “There’s too much gamesmanship. There’s too much (privilege for) certain people over others. Ten years from now, we’d better go in the opposite direction.”
Mitchell framed success as incoming students knowing exactly what they will get out of a college degree, citing factors such as financial cost, school population and post-graduation prospects.
“If those all are clear, I think we have a chance, maybe, of having this marketplace in higher education work for our students,” Mitchell said.
