Boston College has retained its status as among the nation’s best research universities in the recently updated designations used by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.
The University was included in the CCIHE classification “Doctoral Universities: Very High Research Activities” that was announced in December. According to CCIHE, the doctoral university categories include institutions that conferred at least 20 research/scholarship doctorates and reported a minimum of $5 million dollars of total research expenditures. The research activity index was then used to determine a cutoff between the “very high research activity” (R1) institutions, and “high research activity” (R2) institutions. The R1 classification includes less than three percent of educational institutes in the U.S.
This designation, CCIHE notes, “represents a return to the labels used for those categories in 2005 and 2010.”
“The classification reflects Boston College’s continued commitment to engaging in research and scholarship at the highest level,” said Vice Provost for Research and Academic Planning Thomas Chiles, the DeLuca Professor in Biology. “Boston College faculty, students, and staff are conducting basic and translational research that is impacting people’s lives and the planet.”
Starting in 1970, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education developed a classification of colleges and universities to support its program of research and policy analysis. Using empirical data on colleges and universities, the Carnegie Classification was originally published in 1973, and as of December has now been updated eight times to reflect changes among colleges and universities. This framework has been widely used in the study of higher education, CCIHE explains, both as a way to represent and control for institutional differences, and also in the design of research studies to ensure adequate representation of sampled institutions, students, or faculty.
—University Communications | March 2019
