{"id":845,"date":"2025-12-03T07:33:56","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T15:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carnegie25live.wpenginepowered.com\/?page_id=845"},"modified":"2026-01-20T17:13:46","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T01:13:46","slug":"our-legacy","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.carnegiefoundation.org\/our-legacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Our Legacy<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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NO PERSON WILL MAKE A GREAT BUSINESS WHO WANTs TO DO IT ALL HIMSELF OR GET ALL THE CREDIT.
\u2013 andrew carnegie<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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120 Years of Impact in Education<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Our Legacy<\/a><\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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1906<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Carnegie Foundation is chartered by Congress<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n

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1918<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

TIAA_CREF (TIAA) Pension Fund established<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n

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1937<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Graduate Record Examination (GRE) developed<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n

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1947<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Educational Testing Service (ETS) launches<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n

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1968<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Research supports creation of federal Pell Grant Program<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n

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1971<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n

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2022<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

High School Transformation<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n

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2025<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Opportunity Colleges and Universities (OCUs)<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Andrew Carnegie<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n

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Headquarters of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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The Early Years<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was established in 1905 and chartered in 1906 by an act of Congress as an independent policy and research center called to \u201cdo and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of the teacher and the cause of higher education.\u201d Today the mission of the Foundation is to catalyze transformational change in education so that every student has the opportunity to live a healthy, dignified, and fulfilling life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andrew Carnegie\u2014an American industrialist and a leading philanthropist of his time\u2014created the Foundation to address what he perceived as a pressing issue on the education landscape at the time: the lack of any form of retirement plan or system for the faculty at institutions of higher education. His concern first surfaced as a trustee of Cornell University and through conversations with his friend Henry Pritchett, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that made evident the low salaries of higher education faculty and the glaring poverty into which most professors retired. As a result, Carnegie established the Foundation as a general pension fund for a wide range of universities in the United States, Canada, and Newfoundland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To move forward with its mission, the Foundation found that it needed to determine which schools qualified as a bona fide institution of higher education and which of their faculty qualified for pensions. The resulting eligibility standards created by the Foundation became the most widely used basis for the admissions requirements and instructional policies of colleges and universities, as well as the graduation requirements for high schools. Higher education institutions soon adopted what came to be known as the \u201cCarnegie Unit\u201d to measure students\u2019 progress through a course of study in terms of Carnegie credit hours\u2014a measure in which one hour per week of contact between student and faculty equaled one credit. This early impact of these standards on educational organization and practice in secondary and postsecondary education in the United States continues to this day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1918, the Foundation spun off the pension fund as an independent not-for-profit organization known as TIAA-CREF (now known as TIAA) that serves as the world\u2019s largest retirement management system for academics, researchers, and individuals in the public serving not-for-profit sector. TIAA has served as a model for numerous other employee retirement benefit systems, and many of its structural elements and procedures were influential on the first federal oversight of such plans, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 and its attendant regulations.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Significant Contributions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Throughout its more than 115-year history, the Carnegie Foundation has made a number of contributions to the field of education generally and higher education in particular. The most significant of these are briefly summarized here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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