Colleges and universities are doing a better job lately explaining the value of their degrees, and increasingly they’re getting important help in making that case.

The challenge has been that while on average, a bachelor’s degree is worth more than $1.2 million in lifetime earnings, the value for any individual graduate depends on multiple factors, including majors, where a person lives, and the cost of those degrees.

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In a narrow and outdated formula that includes variables like how many applications a college denies, how high their admitted students’ test scores are, and how large their endowment is. But that definition of excellence doesn’t serve students—or America.

If we care about long-term student success and national competitiveness, we need to focus on the institutions that deliver social and economic mobility at scale. And by every meaningful measure, public universities—especially regional public universities—do this best.

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There is as much variety among the nearly 4,000 degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States as in the nation itself. From tiny liberal arts colleges to massive universities with student populations as large as a major city—and everything in between—it’s important to understand the differences among them. This is especially true as questions about the value of higher education continue to grow louder.

Fortunately, one of the primary systems for differentiating colleges just got a major overhaul.

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The American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching on Thursday released updates to the Carnegie Classifications, including a redesigned system to describe institutions and a new category to identify colleges that boost student access and earnings. 

For the system’s basic classifications, colleges were previously grouped together based on the highest degree they awarded — a method that “fell short of adequately describing the full scope of activity on campuses across the country,” according to the announcement. 

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The latest Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education is here, and there’s a new top category for colleges to strive for: “Opportunity Colleges and Universities.”

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As widespread public skepticism about the value of a degree persists, a new institutional classification system recognizes colleges and universities that afford all types of students the opportunity to access an education and earn competitive wages thereafter. It’s the latest update to the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, which has also spent the past few years retooling its decades-old framework for categorizing colleges and universities.

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Newly redesigned Carnegie Classifications released today intend to better reflect how higher education is changing and to make them more useful to stakeholders.

Two main classification updates were announced Thursday by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Council on Education (ACE). The first is a redesign of the Institutional Classification — previously called the Basic Classification — that groups higher education institutions based on several factors, including a broader look at the types of degrees awarded, subjects in which they are awarded and the size of the institutions. The update includes 31 Institutional Classifications.

The second is a new Student Access and Earnings Classification that examines how institutions serve students from the communities they serve and the earned wages of former students.

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