Carnegie Classifications, College Tiers, and What They Mean

What are college tier rankings based on?

Research institutions are ranked based on three indicators:

• the number of research or practice doctorates awarded;
• the amount of money spent on research; and
• the number of research faculty.

This drives a formula for quantitative categorization that tells us how much money is raised and spent on research versus how many students and faculty the institution has.

What do these tiers mean to universities?

The Carnegie Classifications are very important to institutions, especially graduate schools with a focus on research. Colleges and universities care deeply about how they rank and make deliberate choices to improve and/or maintain their ranking. There is a lot of prestige that comes with a high ranking. For many colleges and universities, the Carnegie Classifications can contribute to reputation and standing in the academic community, and may figure prominently into the ability of schools to attract top students and faculty.

For instance, if Carnegie classifies a college or university as an R1 (or top-tier research institution), it is highly likely that this same institution will enjoy a high ranking from a noted college ranker such as U.S. News & World Report. In fact, most prominent college ranking services rely to some extent on the tiers dictated by the Carnegie Classification system.

Though unofficial, these tier-based labels are tied largely to each school’s investment in both research and faculty, and how favorably these investments match the size of a student body. These factors may correlate directly to an institution’s ability to attract top talent and generous endowments, and consequently, their capacity to leverage academic influence across a wide spectrum of disciplines.

What do Carnegie Classifications mean for students?

The Carnegie Classification won’t necessarily tell students which schools are best, and it really isn’t meant to. The Carnegie Classification is simply a system for categorization, intended to sort schools into categories by degree type and emphasis on research. In fact, while college ranking services will usually acknowledge the Carnegie Classifications, these tiers will be incorporated into a larger set of indicators before a service like U.S. News & World Report can arrive at a qualitative ranking.

Carnegie Classifications aren’t explicitly tied to the quality of education or the student experience. The Carnegie Classifications are not informed by student-focused metrics such as graduation rates, extracurriculars, after-graduation employment, student services, or campus facilities. In this regard, the Carnegie Classifications aren’t meant as a way to discern the overall quality of an institution.

Instead, the classifications are designed to group colleges and universities based on their research activities. For students and prospective students, Carnegie’s tiers offer basic groupings within which schools are comparable in terms of their size, research emphasis, and their student-to-faculty ratio.

This means that the Carnegie Classification may be one helpful starting point for students in search of the right school. It may be an especially good way to determine if your graduate school is more focused on research or teaching. Your preference for one experience or the other will play a major role in your grad school destination. The Carnegie Classification can help point you in the right direction.

From there, you must take into account the indicators that are most important from you, whether they relate to student experience, faculty influence, affordability, accessibility, geographical location, or the countless other factors that will enter into this important decision.

For help weighing these factors, find out what you should look for in a graduate school.

Or read on to learn more about the differences between teaching and research universities.

What About Carnegie Classifications?

Carnegie classifications have long been used to determine top-tier research universities. But despite all efforts, lots of academics noticed a great flaw in these rankings.

Rethinking Carnegie Classifications

While beneficial, the Carnegie classifications can also cause bigger problems in higher education. For example, universities tend to hire more staff and produce more doctorates than is necessary to shift from R-3 to R-2 or R-2 to R-1. This may cause a waste of taxpayer dollars.

From a pedagogical perspective, the high number of research doctorates awarded reduces spending on professoriate hiring and curriculum development per student. This will likely lead to low-quality education in humanities departments where student consumption drives the business model more than learning and teaching.

From an economic perspective, universities are creating an endowment market where they compete against each other to be the best at conferring these “research” initiatives while they build no productive infrastructure or faculty-hiring capacity within their institutions.

The Carnegie classifications are, unfortunately, based on aggregate numbers, which fail to account for the quality of scholarly research or actual faculty productivity. They do not account for the quantity of peer-reviewed papers published by department members, their worth, or their efficacy; instead, they measure aggregate amounts of people and investment.

Regardless of apparent faults, the Carnegie classifications are not at all useless today. Just that they are being misapplied and abused, which harms higher education as a whole economically.

In the past, the Carnegie classifications were used to identify the prestige of a university. However, these classifications have become less helpful for this purpose as research quality has risen dramatically over the years. At many universities today, experts are questioning the value of Carnegie classifications in determining the identity or quality of research performed at institutions.

In addition, the Carnegie classifications do not measure research activity. The Carnegie rankings are supposed to be a measure of the amount of research expenditure going on at each university. However, if a university spends money on R-1 and R-2 but does not yield research results, that would be a bad investment. It seems as though Carnegie may reward or penalize universities for spending more money on funding than actually producing results.