(Excerpts from Higher Ed News)

• The Carnegie classifications are an enduring institution in higher education, but they’re about to undergo a facelift that could be dramatic.
• Tim Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation, and Ted Mitchell, president of ACE, discussed the partnership and why the time is right to refresh the classifications.
• The conversation explored their plan to add a significant focus on whether and how much colleges and universities contribute to social mobility and racial equity, potentially by creating an entirely new classification that would sort institutions by the degree to which they’re engines of mobility and equity.
• Higher Ed: Tim, you’re newish to Carnegie and presumably brought a fresh eye to the classifications. What is your sense about what the classifications as they’re currently constructed do well, and maybe where are the gaps that could use some improvement?
• Knowles: They are almost 50 years old, so my first comment is that they are ready for rethinking, rescrutinizing, reimagining. That said, they do some things and have done some things incredibly well. They create a typology in an incredibly diverse ecosystem, their way of differentiating based on all sorts of vectors, what degrees are given out, size of institution, the amount of research versus teaching activities.
• Higher Ed: Ted, what’s your sense of what is working and what isn’t with the current classifications?
• Mitchell: The number of  of institutions has tripled. The number of students who are going to higher education has quadrupled. It’s time to take a look at this. One downside to where the classifications have been is that what started out as a typology, a descriptive set of categories, has become normative. And that idea of a gold standard, or a north star, has not simply captured the missions of institutions, but it has directed the missions of institutions. I think we want to create multiple lanes of institutional excellence that are aligned with their missions, rather than asking them to reshape their missions to align with the classifications.