Otis Recognized for Community Engagement by Carnegie Foundation

Congratulations to Otis College of Art and Design for being recognized in their efforts in community engagement!

The following excerpt comes from the school website:

“Otis College of Art and Design is honored to be among the select group of colleges and universities in the United States designated this year to receive the Carnegie Foundation’s prestigious 2015 Community Engagement Classification.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has selected 240 U.S. colleges and universities to receive its 2015 Community Engagement Classification. Of this number, 83 institutions are receiving the classification for the first time, while 157 are now re-classified, after being classified originally in 2006 or 2008. These 240 institutions join the 121 institutions that earned the classification during the 2010 selection process.

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“The importance of this elective classification is borne out by the response of so many campuses that have demonstrated their deep engagement with local, regional, national, and global communities,” said John Saltmarsh, director of the New England Resource Center for Higher Education. “These are campuses that are improving teaching and learning, producing research that makes a difference in communities, and revitalizing their civic and academic missions.”

Since its founding in 1918, Otis College of Art and Design has served a highly diverse student body. Otis leads among its national peers of independent colleges of art and design in students’ ethnic and racial diversity, as well as the percentage of socio-economically disadvantaged students who are Pell-grant eligible. The educational promise at Otis College is that art and design training will help transform students into thriving professionals and contributing citizens, and with the evidence of alumni success, that result has been consistently realized. For the College, educational and social missions have always been intertwined. Community engagement is second nature to Otis in this context. In fulfillment of its mission to “prepare diverse students of art and design to enrich our world through their creativity, their skill, and their vision,” Otis has taken a whole-College approach to its commitment to community engagement.

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Otis has embraced, taught, and celebrated community engagement, because it is central to the College’s educational philosophy, which is based on the belief that art and design matter socially, culturally, and economically.

The Carnegie Foundation, through the work of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, developed the first typology of American colleges and universities in 1970 as a research tool to describe and represent the diversity of U.S. higher education. The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education (now housed at Indiana University Bloomington’s Center for Postsecondary Research) continues to be used for a wide range of purposes by academic researchers, institutional personnel, policymakers and others.”

Read more about Otis’ community initiatives in the original post, here.