Ending the Research 1 ‘Arms Race’

More than 40 new institutions have achieved Research-1 status under a new, simplified Carnegie classification methodology announced Thursday morning.

Designed to discourage institutions from deviating from their mission just to achieve R-1 status, the revamped classification requires a university to meet just two criteria—instead of the previous 10—to be awarded the highest designation: spend at least $50 million on total annual research and award at least 70 research doctorates a year.

“This will be a major factor for us in attracting and retaining world-class faculty and students,” said Andrew Barnard, vice president for research at Michigan Technological University, a newly minted R-1 institution located in the state’s rural Upper Peninsula. “R-1 also unlocks different and larger funding opportunities, so we expect to see our research portfolio grow over the next few years. That has a direct impact on our local and regional economy.”

Since 1973, R-1 status—which signifies the highest levels of spending and doctorate production—has endowed colleges and universities with both prestige and opportunity, making them more competitive applicants for the biggest available federal and private research grants and elevating their ability to recruit and retain top students and faculty.

The methodology for determining which institutions qualify as R-1 has changed multiple times over the past five decades. The most recent methodology, in effect from 2005 to 2021, used complex and opaque evaluation metrics that ranked R-1 and R-2 institutions against each other on 10 different factors, including doctoral production across different fields.

That formula prevented universities like Michigan Tech from attaining R-1 status and accruing all its advantages, though the university spent $106.9 million on research in 2024 and graduates an average of 85 doctoral students per year, mostly in STEM fields. Broadening its doctoral program offerings “was a change that a specialized university like Michigan Tech was going to have trouble achieving,” Barnard said. “We weren’t going to change the way we do business just to get R-1, even though we were doing a lot of research already.”

‘Perverse Incentives’

But many universities have attempted to reconfigure their academic offerings in the hopes of achieving R-1 status under the old methodology. That was one of the biggest concerns driving the Carnegie Foundation’s collaboration with the American Council on Education to redesign the Carnegie classification framework.

“The arms race to become an R-1 institution created a whole set of perverse incentives for an institution—whether it was adding new doctoral programs for a more comprehensive array of doctorates or aspiring to add higher and higher degrees—when in fact that may not have been central to their mission,” said Timothy Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. “The aim shouldn’t be for all 4,000-plus higher education institutions in the nation to try to become large Ph.D.-conferring universities. The strength of the American postsecondary sector is its diversity of institution types.”

As a result of the changes announced Thursday, 187 institutions are now designated R-1, compared to 146 in 2021, the last time institutions were evaluated.

The criteria for an R-2 institution, which signifies high spending and doctorate production, remain unchanged: An institution must spend at least $5 million on research and development and award a minimum of 20 research doctorates each year. Nonetheless, the number of R-2s has increased from 132 in 2021 to 139 in 2024.

Among the universities that attained R-1 status for the first time this year were several state flagships, including the Universities of Rhode Island, North Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho and Vermont.

Kirk Dombrowski, vice president for research and economic development at the University of Vermont, said he expects having R-1 status will help UVM attract more top-tier students and faculty, as well as undertake large-scale projects funded by private and federal research grants that are typically reserved for R-1 institutions.

“UVM is really the only research university in the state in terms of scale, which is fairly unusual,” Dombrowski said. “For us, the research enterprise is a big driver of the start-up economy here, which is pretty good in Burlington. And in terms of workforce, by being a research university we attract a different level of students to Vermont and many of them stay, which is a big part of our contribution to the future of the state.”

Howard First HBCU to Get R-1

Howard University in Washington, D.C., is also among the new R-1 designees, and is the first historically Black college or university to attain the classification. (It previously got R-1 status in 1987 but lost it in 2005 after updates to the classifications.)

“R-1 was our North Star,” said Bruce Jones, Howard’s senior vice president for research. He took the position in 2018 and made it his mission for Howard to attain R-1 status under the old guidelines, starting with establishing a research office.

“The old criteria was more ambiguous,” he said. “There were 10 metrics versus two today. You had to go all out for all of those metrics because part of that formula involved a comparison of other institutions.”

According to Jones, Howard did just that and met the old R-1 criteria in 2022. But because Carnegie only evaluates institutions every three years, Howard’s R-1 status was not official until Thursday, though Jones said the $85 million it spent on research and 96 Ph.D.s it conferred in 2023 easily met the new criteria then.

“We’re about educating, training and graduating students who will go out and change the world for the better,” Jones said. “R-1 will enable us to further that mission.”

Smaller Institutions Recognized

While Howard is the only HBCU to achieve R-1 status, numerous others, including Alabama State University and Fisk University in Tennessee, are among 218 smaller institutions to receive an entirely new designation, Research College and Universities.

To qualify as an RCU, an institution must spend at least $2.5 million on research and development on average in a single year. Most of them confer few, if any, doctoral degrees.

“These are a very diverse set of institutions, including community colleges, tribal colleges and small liberal arts colleges,” said Mushtaq Gunja, executive director of the Carnegie Classification Systems and senior vice president of ACE. “These are institutions that aren’t trying to have Ph.D. production—especially research doctorates—but that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing research. In a lot of these places, there are very robust research infrastructures that are important to the undergraduates and the mission of the organization.”

One of the “tricky” aspects of the old system, Gunja said, was that it required an institution to graduate Ph.D.s to get any recognition for its research activity—an oversight the new RCU classification was developed to correct.

“It allows for recognizing research in all of the places that it happens, and doesn’t incentivize institutions to mold their degree production to a Carnegie classification set of metrics,” Gunja said. “We’re allowing every institution to double down on what they’re good at and hopefully be the best version of themselves.”

Specter of Federal Cuts

Looming over all the optimism about the new classification system and its recognition of the value of research across different institution types is the Trump administration’s pledge to slash federal funding, including money universities rely on to conduct research.

Although Trump’s recent attempt to unilaterally cap indirect cost reimbursement rates at 15 percent for all National Institutes of Health grants—the largest federal funder of university research—has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge, higher education leaders have warned of dire consequences if the $4 billion cut takes effect.

“The real damage is going to happen in the R-2 and RCU sector, where institutions are just developing their research infrastructure,” said Ted Mitchell, president of ACE, which is party to a lawsuit against the NIH’s indirect cost caps. “Those are the ones that will be devastated by cuts in both programmatic and facilities support. They’re likely to move from doing research to not.”

And the implications wouldn’t stop at the perimeter of those campuses.

“While we think of research dollars going to big fancy science labs, it’s also the case that the research that’s being funded is research on health disparities in tribal communities and in rural medicine,” Mitchell said. “If all that’s cut, these communities and those institutions will be in real trouble.”

(This story has been updated to reflect more state flagship institutions that have attained R1 status.)