The credit-hour, often known as the Carnegie unit, has been the essential measure of American secondary and higher education for more than a century.

Now the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which developed the time-based system in 1906, wants to consign it to history. The foundation has just launched what foundation President Tim Knowles expects to be a decade-long research, practice, and legislative initiative to replace time as the essential measure of learning.

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Call it seat time, student hours, contact credit. For more than a century, students’ progress toward academic degrees has been broken into 120-hour chunks: the Carnegie unit.

Now, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which developed the time-based system in 1906, wants to consign it to history.

“We’re at a key moment in human history that demands transformation, and transforming how we educate young people must be at the top of the list,” said Timothy Knowles, who became the 10th president of the Carnegie Foundation in 2021. “If it takes us 30 years to catch up to where we were before the pandemic, the United States is arguably in not just serious educational trouble, but serious social and economic trouble as well.”

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