Carnegie unit

Carnegie unit, basic unit of the academic credit system developed in 1906 as a means of formalizing course credit in American secondary schools. Originally formulated as an element of the criteria for schools to qualify for funds from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT), the Carnegie unit soon became the accepted way for teachers, administrators, and college admissions officers to interpret credits on students’ secondary school transcripts.

Prior to the creation of the Carnegie unit, there was no uniform way to document and evaluate student progress in the United States, nor was there a clear standard for differentiating high school-level work from university- or college-level work. That changed when the Scottish American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie established CFAT and made a $10 million donation to start a fund for professors’ pensions in 1905. The foundation’s criteria for eligibility defined a college as any four-year institution that maintained six or more professors. To be admitted to a college, a student would have had to attend four years of high school, with a year’s work consisting of 120 60-minute hours (or the equivalent of study). This designation labeled the high-school credit system as a unit of time instead of a measure of learning.

Universities, colleges, and high schools were free to accept or reject the Carnegie Foundation’s criteria, but the lure of funds was such that by 1912 the Carnegie unit had been adopted nearly universally within the United States.