The U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) employs various categories to classify postsecondary institutions. This note outlines the different categories used in varying combinations in indicators 7, 21, 31, 32, and 33.

BASIC IPEDS CLASSIFICATIONS

The term “postsecondary institutions” is the category used to refer to institutions with formal instructional programs and a curriculum designed primarily for students who have completed the requirements for a high school diploma or its equivalent. For many analyses, however, comparing all institutions from across this broad universe of postsecondary institutions would not be appropriate. Thus, postsecondary institutions are placed in one of three levels, based on the highest award offered at the institution:

• 4-year-and-above institutions: Institutions or branches that award a 4-year degree or higher in one or more programs, or a postbaccalaureate, postmaster’s, or post-first-professional certificate.
  
  
• 2-year but less-than-4-year institutions: Institutions or branches that confer at least a 2-year formal award (certificate, diploma, or associate’s degree), or that have a 2-year program creditable toward a baccalaureate degree.
  
  
• Less-than-2-year institutions: Institutions or branches that have programs lasting less than 2 years that result in a terminal occupational award or are creditable toward a degree at the 2-year level or higher.
  

Postsecondary institutions are further divided according to these criteria: degree-granting versus nondegree-granting; type of financial control; and Title IV-participating versus not Title IV-participating.

Degree-granting institutions offer associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, doctor’s, and/or first-professional degrees that a state agency recognizes or authorizes. Nondegree-granting institutions offer other kinds of credentials and exist at all three levels. The number of 4-year nondegree-granting institutions is small compared with the number at both the 2-year but less-than-4-year and less-than-2-year levels.

IPEDS classifies institutions at each of the three levels of institutions by type of financial control: public; private not-for-profit; or private for-profit (e.g., proprietary schools). Thus, IPEDS divides the universe of postsecondary institutions into nine different “sectors.” In some sectors (for example, 4-year private for-profit institutions), the number of institutions is small relative to other sectors. Institutions in any of these nine sectors can be degree- or nondegree-granting.

Institutions in any of these nine sectors can also be Title IV-participating or not. For an institution to participate in federal Title IV Higher Education Act, Part C, financial aid programs, it must offer a program of study at least 300 clock hours in length; have accreditation recognized by the U.S. Department of Education; have been in business for at least 2 years; and have a Title IV participation agreement with the U.S. Department of Education. All indicators on this website using IPEDS data are restricted to Title IV-participating institutions.

In some indicators based on IPEDS data, 4-year degree-granting institutions are further classified according to the highest degree awarded. Doctoral institutions award at least 20 doctoral degrees per year. Master’s institutions award 20 or more master’s degrees per year. The remaining institutions are considered to be Other 4-year institutions. The number of degrees awarded by an institution in a given year is obtained for each institution from data published in the IPEDS “Completions Survey” (IPEDS-C).

• Indicator 7 includes 2-year (short for 2-year but less-than-4-year) and 4-year degree-granting institutions in its analysis.
  
  
• Indicator 31 includes Doctoral, Master’s, Other 4-year, and 2-year degree-granting institutions in its analysis.
  
  
• Indicator 32 includes 2-year and 4-year; public and private; Doctoral, Master’s, and Other 4-year degree-granting institutions in its analysis.
  

Note that the data for indicator 32 come from IPEDS’s “Salaries, Tenure, and Fringe Benefits of Full-Time Instructional Faculty Survey” (IPEDS-SA), which applies to all 4-year institutions and 2-year degree-granting institutions. Less-than-2-year institutions and 2-year non-degree-granting institutions are excluded from the scope of the Salaries survey. Also excluded are institutions in which all instructional faculty are military personnel; contribute their services; teach preclinical or clinical medicine; or are employed on a part-time basis. The final universe for the staff/faculty collection was 4,865 institutions (excluding those in outlying territories); for the Salary component, it was 4,061. Thus, 804 institutions were excluded from the Salary component: 748 were excluded because they were non-degree-granting 2-year or less-than-2-year institutions, 56 were excluded for one of these other reasons.

NELS CLASSIFICATIONS

Postsecondary institutions can be grouped into categories denoting different degrees of selectivity, as is often done for guides to colleges and universities. The five institutional selectivity categories for the 1992 NELS cohort in table 21-1—“highly selective,” “selective,” “nonselective,” “open door,” and “not ratable”—are from the American Freshman (Higher Education Research Institute 1992). Assigning institutions to one of the first three of these categories was done based on a number of factors, including the ratio of acceptances to applicants and the average composite SAT score of students in the entering class. All community colleges and area vocational-technical institutes (AVTIs) were assigned to the category of “open door.” Institutions that cannot be categorized according to the criteria identified above are considered not ratable. In the 1992 cohort, 4 percent of students attended a highly selective institution, 13 percent attended a selective institution, 41 percent attended a nonselective institution, 3 percent attended an open-door institution, and 39 percent attended an institution that is not ratable.

CARNEGIE CLASSIFICATIONS

The Carnegie Classification groups American colleges and universities by their purpose and size. First developed in 1970 by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, the classification system does not establish a hierarchy among 2- and 4-year degree-granting institutions; instead it groups colleges and universities with similar programs and purposes to facilitate meaningful comparisons and analysis. The Carnegie Classification system has been revised four times—in 1976, 1987, 1994, and 2000—since it was created. The 1994 classification, used for indicators in this volume, divides institutions of higher education into 10 categories, with the 10th category—Professional Schools and Specialized Institutions—subdivided into 10 subcategories (see table of definitions on next page).

The information used to classify institutions into the Carnegie categories comes from survey data. The 1994 version of Carnegie Classifications relied on data from IPEDS, the National Science Foundation, The College Board, and the 1994 Higher Education Directory published by Higher Education Publications, Inc.

The following key provides a guide to the category labels used by indicator 21, which used different labels to refer to different combinations of the Carnegie Classification categories. Indicator 33 used abbreviated versions of the Carnegie Classification labels but did not combine categories other than to collapse types I and II for categories with both types.

Indicator 21

• Doctoral: includes Research Universities I and II, Doctoral Universities I and II.
  
  
• Comprehensive: includes Comprehensive Universities I and II.
  
  
• Baccalaureate: includes Baccalaureate Colleges I and II.
  
  
• Specialized: includes Professional Schools and Specialized Institutions.
  

Carnegie Classification Categories (1994 Definitions¹)

¹Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (1994). In December 2000, the Carnegie Foundation released an updated version of its classification system of institutions of higher education. The new scheme is available at the Carnegie Foundation website (http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/Classification/index.htm).

²Doctoral degrees include Doctor of Education, Doctor of Judicial Science, Doctor of Public Health, and the Ph.D. in any field.

³Total federal obligation figures are available from the National Science Foundation's annual report, Federal Support to Universities, Colleges, and Nonprofit Institutions. The years used in averaging total federal obligations are 1989, 1990, and 1991.

⁴The academic year for determining the number of degrees awarded by institutions was 1983-84.