The first wave of reconceived Carnegie classifications is out, shaking up listings that have long been a coveted source of prestige for colleges. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Council on Education, which manage the classifications, posted colleges’ research designations on Thursday.
There are now three possible research categories that colleges can fall under:
- Research 1: Very High Spending and Doctorate Production (187 institutions): Institutions that, on average in a single year, spend at least $50 million on research and development and award at least 70 research doctorates.
- Research 2: High Spending and Doctorate Production (139 institutions): Institutions that, on average in a single year, spend at least $5 million on research and development and award at least 20 research doctorates.
- Research Colleges and Universities (218 institutions): Institutions not on one of the above lists that, on average in a single year, award at least $2.5 million on research and development.
The third category, “Research Colleges and Universities,” is new, and allows for institutions that conduct some research to get a research designation even if they don’t offer doctorates, which wasn’t possible in past Carnegie classifications. It also allows for tribal colleges to get a research designation. In the past, “tribal college” and the “R1” and “R2" categories were mutually exclusive. The change is intended to “shed light on institutions that have engaged in research but historically haven’t been recognized for it,” Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said in a statement.
Over all, the Carnegie Classification’s managers hoped both to acknowledge the research that happens at non-doctoral universities, and to make research intensity less central to a college’s identity, as they told The Chronicle previously.
The graph below shows the mix of institutions, as they were earlier designated, that now make up each of the three 2025 categories.
Here is the full list of institutions in the 2025 research classification compared with their 2021 basic classification:
The American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation plan to release new classifications for every college — not just those that conduct research — in April 2025. In the new core classifications, colleges will be sorted by “characteristics including the types of degrees they award, the fields of study in which students receive their degree, and the size of the institution,” according to a release accompanying the new research listings.
