The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education is making changes to its most closely watched college labels.
The American Council on Education, which helps manage the classifications, is making several revisions, effective in 2025. The one that will capture the most attention is its drastic simplification of the criteria that determine what caliber of research university an institution is. Carnegie Classification analysts have long used a complex formula, involving 10 factors and calculations that compare universities, to decide which ones will get the coveted “doctoral universities — very high research activity,” or “R1,” label. Now, just two factors distinguish that designation from the R2 level (“high research activity”): how much money an institution spends on research, and how many doctorates it awards in a year.
In 2025, the cutoff for the R1 label will be spending $50 million on research, and awarding at least 70 doctorates, in any research field, in a year. For R2, it’s $5 million in research expenditures, and 20 doctorates. There will also be a new category, “research colleges and universities,” for colleges with at least $2.5 million in research expenditures annually.
The new sorting is likely to startle administrators who’ve long used certain calculations and strategies to try to land their institutions on one of higher ed’s most exclusive lists. “It is a fairly big deal because the R1 designation has so much power in the higher-education industry,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
For decades, those who have run the classifications insisted that their categories are merely neutral descriptors, not a ranked hierarchy that colleges are supposed to try to ascend. Nevertheless, many college leaders seek to lift their institutions to R1 status, or whichever category they see as a step above their own. Aspirations to reach R1 status appear frequently in colleges’ strategic plans and initiatives. Many in higher education believe that being classified as an R1 helps colleges land research funding and attract faculty members.
Now ACE says it wants to lower the temperature around the research categories; to disincentivize institutions from making decisions based on achieving R1 status; and to recognize a wider variety of institutional accomplishments, including improving students’ socioeconomic fortunes and research done outside of doctorate-granting universities.
For starters, Carnegie’s next round of classifications will no longer list research activity as part of the main label that all colleges get, called the “basic classification.” Instead, research designations will become separate lists for those colleges that qualify.
“We don’t want research to drive the whole conversation about the ‘basic’” classification, said Ted Mitchell, president of ACE, which works with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to administer the college labels. “We certainly aren’t ignoring research, but we want other things to be in focus as well.”
ACE’s analysts haven’t decided what the basic classification categories will be and are gathering advice from the higher-education community, Mitchell said. They’re considering labels that will incorporate four or five qualities about an institution, such as its size, geographic region, and mix of degrees offered.
Another reason they’re removing research from the main label? Most institutions don’t conduct any. ACE analysts are also still working on a classification scheme based on the social and economic mobility colleges help their students achieve. The mobility measure, which ACE announced last year, will be separate from both the basic and research classifications.
Carnegie analysts are announcing the details of the research methodology now because they know it affects how college leaders steer their institutions. “People make decisions every day based on the current Carnegie classifications,” said Sara Gast, deputy executive director for the classification. College leaders have told her about planning budgets, faculty, and academic offerings around Carnegie.
Gast and Mushtaq Gunja, executive director for the classification, said they hoped clear, simple benchmarks for the R1 and R2 categories would provide stability for colleges trying to reach them and would discourage college leaders from “throwing everything” at the goal because they weren’t sure what would work, when the methodology was more complicated and opaque.
Cecilia M. Orphan, an associate professor of education at the University of Denver who serves on the Carnegie Classification’s technical-review panel, said the new formula could reduce attempts to game the system and get a higher category. But Kelchen, of Tennessee, predicted administrators would try harder to game the system, because they now know exactly which two metrics to focus on.
Taryn Lopez, a research associate professor who studies vulcanology at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, leads her institution’s strategic goal of getting R1 status. She was “a little bit relieved” when she heard about the updated classifications. The new cutoff for the number of doctoral graduates is high for Fairbanks, and it will be challenging for the university to reach by its goal year of 2027, but she had been worried the new requirements would be insurmountable.
A New List?
Asked what institutional behaviors the changes would encourage, she said she worried about colleges being incentivized to graduate more doctoral students at a time when there might not be enough academic jobs for them. Yet asked how Fairbanks might change its plans, she listed off strategies for increasing its doctoral graduates. Doctorates from Lopez’s department, geophysics, do get jobs, including at volcano observatories, national labs, and the U.S. Geological Survey, she said: “I’m not ready to throw in the towel now because I feel like we are quite successful.”
Because the research-classification formula doesn’t go into effect until 2025, Carnegie Classification staff members don’t yet have a list of who the new R1, R2, and “research colleges and universities” will be. But what would the list look like if it were assembled with today’s data? The Chronicle ran the numbers using the data sources Carnegie does — the National Science Foundation’s Higher Education Research and Development survey and the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.
The R1 list would be larger, although not vastly so. There are 146 R1 universities in the current classification. The Chronicle projects 168 members with today’s data.
Some colleges would break through with the new metrics. No historically Black colleges or universities are currently classified as R1s. If the list were redone today, Howard University, in Washington, D.C., would make it, for the first time since Carnegie’s 2000 revision. In addition, Northwest Indian College, in Bellingham, Wash., would be categorized as a research college or university. As a tribal college, it’s ineligible for research designations currently.
“There’s going to certainly be some celebration over there,” said Willis A. Jones, an associate professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University. Where the rubber meets the road, he said, is whether new designations will bring the benefits that colleges hope for, that they historically believed came with the R1 badge: more consideration from funding agencies, and a shinier reputation in the eyes of the prospective students, philanthropists, policymakers, and others.
Jacquelyn Elias performed data analysis and created the table for this article.
