Printer-friendly versionThe Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching invites colleges and universities with an institutional focus on community engagement to apply to participate in a new elective classification, developed as part of an extensive reconstruction of the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.
Carnegie recently released five new classification schemes as well as a revised version of the basic classification, and debuted newly created online tools that allow institutions and researchers to generate custom listings. The elective classification represents a second phase of work to revise the Carnegie Classification.
The Foundation, through the work of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, developed the first typology of American colleges and universities in 1970 as a research tool to describe and represent the diversity of U.S. higher education. The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education continues to be used for a wide range of purposes by academic researchers, institutional personnel, policymakers, and others.
The new elective classification will not include all colleges and universities, but instead will allow institutions to choose to participate, providing yet another way for institutions to describe their identity and commitments with a public and nationally recognized classification.
“The elective classification for institutions engaged with community is an exciting move in the Carnegie work of extending and refining the classification of colleges and universities,” said Amy Driscoll, an associate senior scholar at the Foundation, who directed the pilot project. “The classification represents a significant affirmation of the importance of community engagement in the agenda of higher education.”
To create this elective classification, the Foundation consulted with campuses representing a diversity of higher education to define 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 Foundation defines community engagement as the collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.
Information on the application, documentation and review processes can be found on this Web site.
