Fargo, N.D. — North Dakota State University has joined the nation’s top 108 public and private universities in the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education’s elite category of “Research Universities/Very High Research Activity”. View the complete list.

“The Carnegie Commission announcement is an exciting recognition of NDSU’s emerging national status,” said NDSU President Dean L. Bresciani, noting the university’s annual research expenditures, as measured by the National Science Foundation, exceeded $114 million in 2008 and are anticipated to exceed that in upcoming 2009 NSF rankings. “NDSU is a student-focused, land-grant, research institution that has reached a level of contribution to our state and country on par with the nation’s best universities. We are honored by the Carnegie Foundation’s acknowledgement of our achievements, and the opportunity for a North Dakota university to join the nation’s most sought after higher education classification.”

The Carnegie classifications were developed in 1970, and dramatically revised in 2005, which is the last time the lists were updated. According to the Carnegie website, the classifications “provide the framework in which institutional diversity in U.S. higher education is commonly described. It is now the leading taxonomy of all accredited colleges and universities in the United States, currently developed using nationally available data from the U.S. Office of Postsecondary Education, the National Center for Education Statistics’ Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, the National Science Foundation and the College Board.”

According to the foundation, the classifications “are intended to group institutions into meaningful, analytically manageable categories in order to allow researchers to make reasonable comparisons among similar institutions.”

Other universities in the “Very High Research Activity” category include Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Georgetown University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Princeton University, Stanford University, Texas A&M University, University of Minnesota, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Notre Dame, University of Southern California, University of Wisconsin, Vanderbilt University and Yale University.