Elon University is one of 13 colleges and universities selected by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to participate in a pilot project to develop one of the new Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education.
Elon will assist in the development of a classification of colleges and universities that are focused on community engagement.
Elon students, faculty and staff are actively engaged in volunteer and community service. During the 2003-04 school year, Elon students put in more than 82,500 hours of community service. Eighty-eight percent of Elon’s graduating seniors participate in some type of volunteer service. Elon is one of 10 founding members of Project Pericles, an initiative sponsored by the Eugene Lang Foundation that challenges colleges and universities to “instill in students an abiding and active sense of social responsibility and civic concern.”
The Carnegie Classification system 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 system.
“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 will be introduced later this year.
For the pilot project, representatives from Elon and other colleges and universities will work with the foundation to develop new ways to document community engagement activities that are 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.
Participating campuses are:
- Elon University
- Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
- 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
- Kapi’olani Community College
- LaGuardia Community College
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. More information may be found on the Web at www.carnegiefoundation.org.
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