Carnegie Unit

Development of Elective Courses and the Need for Credit

Even in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, credits were not utilized in American schools. In the Civil War era, for example, all students simply were assigned identical course loads including mathematics, classical literature, Latin, and Greek.

Charles W. Eliot (1834–1926), in his 40-year tenure as president of Harvard University, is credited with leading the transformation of a Cambridge, Massachusetts, relatively small college into a preeminent world class university. Eliot was a leading proponent of “progressive education.” Even though he finished second in his graduating class at Harvard, he was not as successful in his first faculty role at his alma mater. After Eliot had achieved the rank of assistant professor of mathematics and chemistry, Harvard did not renew Eliot's appointment in 1863. When he returned home from studying in Europe, Eliot accepted a professorship at the fledgling Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1869, Eliot published in The Atlantic Monthly a groundbreaking essay titled “The New Education.” That essay is said to have solidified Eliot's role as an educational reformer and was a stepping stone to his selection as president of Harvard University in 1869.

Of the many reforms Eliot implemented at Harvard, the one that caught on relatively quickly with other institutions of higher education and secondary schools was the “elective system.” Initiating student freedom in choosing their classes was not a new controversy. While the rationale against student choice, as expressed in the “Yale Report of 1828,” still was honored at many northeastern colleges and schools, Harvard led the way in prescribing courses for freshmen and in initiating course options for upperclassmen. Harvard began to permit students of “senior status” to choose their courses without exception.

Creating this new academic model of permitting students to choose classes had the effect of both expanding the curriculum and designing ways to keep track of what students had studied and how well they had grasped their assignments.

Adoption of the Carnegie Unit

During the early years of the 20th century it was not clear what differentiated high school–level work from university or college-level work. In 1905, Scottish American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie chartered, through an act of Congress, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as a policy and research center charged with performing “all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of the teacher and the cause of higher education.” With a $10 million donation from Carnegie, the Foundation carrying his name established a fund for professors' pensions that would eventually become TIAA-CREF; the fund was available for colleges that accepted his criteria.

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