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Carnegie Selects Institutions to Help Develop New Community Engagement Classification


Stanford, CA, January 2005 (updated May 2005) —The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has selected 14 campuses to participate in a pilot project to help develop one of the new Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education.

As part of the 2005 revision of its widely-used classification system, Carnegie is developing several elective classifications that will not include all colleges and universities, but instead will allow institutions to elect to participate. These 14 campuses were chosen to assist in the development of a classification focused on community engagement (the exchange of knowledge and resources between higher education institutions and their larger communities for mutual benefit). Amy Driscoll, associate senior scholar at the Foundation, leads the pilot project.

The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, a typology of American colleges and universities developed in the early 1970s, is a framework for describing and representing the diversity of U.S. higher education. It is used for a wide range of purposes by academic researchers, institutional personnel, policy makers, and others.

The Foundation is currently engaged in a fundamental reconsideration of the Carnegie Classification. "We plan to develop a more flexible system that will permit institutions to be grouped in several ways, in recognition of the fact that a single classification scheme can conceal the many ways that institutions resemble or differ from one another," said Carnegie Senior Scholar Alexander McCormick, who directs the project.

This work will result in a series of distinct classification schemes, as well as an interactive facility that will enable users to generate their own, customized classifications. The new classification system will be introduced in the second half of 2005 to coincide with the Foundation's centennial.

For the pilot project, representatives from the colleges and universities will convene at Carnegie to work with the Foundation to develop new ways to document community engagement activities that constitute an important element of institutional mission and distinctiveness, but that are not currently represented in the national data on colleges and universities. The selected campuses were chosen to represent a diverse set of institutional types identified as having a strong community engagement mission.

The campuses are:

* California State University Sacramento
* Elon University
* Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis
* Kapi’olani Community College
* LaGuardia Community College
* Michigan State University
* Northern Kentucky University
* Portland State University
* Santa Clara University
* Spelman College
* Tusculum College
* University of Denver
* University of Minnesota
* University of Pennsylvania




Founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered in 1906 by an act of Congress, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is an independent policy and research center with a primary mission "to do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of the teacher and the cause of higher education." The improvement of teaching and learning is central to all of the work of the Foundation. The Foundation is located in Stanford, Calif.

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