Why did the Carnegie Foundation change its classification system?
A single classification cannot do justice to the complex nature of higher education today. When the Carnegie Classification was created in 1970, there were about 2,800 U.S. colleges and universities. Today there are nearly 4,400. Colleges and universities are complex organizations, and a single classification masks the range of ways they can resemble or differ from one another. As valuable as it has been, the basic framework has blind spots. For example, it says nothing about undergraduate education for institutions that award more than a minimum number of graduate degrees. Yet most of these institutions enroll more undergraduates than graduate or professional students. Another motivation for these changes has to do with the persistent confusion of classification and ranking. For years, both the Carnegie Foundation and others in the higher education community have been concerned about the extent to which the Carnegie Classification dominates considerations of institutional differences,
