Carnegie Unit and Student Hour - History

History

These units came about, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, through a series of three disjointed events, all designed to standardize the collegiate educational experience.

Event One-Arbitrary Comprehensive Exams Discredited. Prior to this time (late 19th century) admission to post-secondary education involved comprehensive examination, either by public oral process, or private written process. These processes varied greatly among U.S. colleges and universities, due to the highly subjective nature of these types of examination. Eventually, these methods were slowly discredited due to their poor reliability and validity.

Event Two-Creation and Advocacy for Standard Education Unit. Charles W. Eliot at Harvard University, in the late 19th century, devised both a contact-hour standard for secondary education, and the original credit-hour collegiate post-secondary standard. In 1894, the National Education Association endorsed the standardization of secondary education.

Event Three-Widespread Enforcement of Standards by Carnegie Foundation. Widespread adoption of the 120-hour secondary standard did not occur until the Carnegie Foundation (established in 1906) began to provide retirement pensions (now known as TIAA-CREF) for university professors with the qualification that universities must enforce the 120-hour secondary standard. By 1910, nearly all secondary institutions in the United States used the "Carnegie Unit" as a measure of secondary course work.

As part of their framework, the Carnegie Foundation also established that both high school preparation and college "work" would include a minimum of four years of study.

On a parallel track, the Carnegie Foundation also underwrote the work of Morris L. Cooke's "Academic and Industrial Efficiency." Again, the motive here was to standardize educational outputs and faculty workloads. Cooke established the collegiate Student Hour as "an hour of lecture, of lab work, or of recitation room work, for a single pupil" per week (1/5 of the Carnegie Unit's 5-hour week), during a single semester (or 15 weeks, 1/2 of the Carnegie Unit's 30-week period). (The Student Hour would technically be 1/10 of the Carnegie Unit: 1/5 hour per week times 1/2 year = 1/10.) ...