Stony the Road We Trod: The Tradeoffs Universities Face in Chasing the R1 Designation
For over five decades, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education has characterized the diversity of institutions that comprise the US higher education landscape. The top performers of research, deemed R1 universities, generally have high research spending and significant doctoral production. Though the classification system was not originally intended to create a hierarchy of universities, the R1 research designation has become a powerful symbol of prestige. But some universities that set their sights on becoming R1s will take decades to get there.
Non-R1s received only 25% of all federal research expenditures in 2023, despite educating a majority of those entering the STEM workforce.
The conventional wisdom is that the fixation on attaining R1 status pushes some higher education institutions to strive for research excellence. But this preoccupation overshadows the contributions to knowledge creation and innovation from the other 95% of institutions, so opportunities to strengthen them go overlooked. Consider that non-R1s received only 25% of all federal research expenditures in 2023, despite educating a majority of those entering the STEM workforce, providing important opportunities for students across the country, and supporting robust research activities. As the nation’s science enterprise is challenged to be more competitive with fewer resources, recognizing and supporting the research capacity of non-R1s offers a path toward a more dynamic innovation landscape.
A bright light at the end of an expensive tunnel
Minority-serving institutions (MSIs), and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in particular, serve both as gateways to science and engineering spaces and as engines of innovation. Their relationship to the R1 status reveals the designation’s hidden trade-offs. The traditionally defined HBCU designation recognizes institutions established to educate Black Americans prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964; today, 102 HBCUs (a mix of public and private and two- and four-year institutions and the Southern University Law Center) exist. HBCUs have long been applauded for improving student retention, outcomes, and social mobility, but are less recognized as contributors to discovery and innovation. Only one HBCU, Howard University, has achieved R1 status to date, but at least 10 others with an R2 designation have made gaining R1 status a top priority.
What has hampered HBCUs from becoming R1s is a history of underinvestment—from the federal government, states, and other funding sources—that has stymied their ability to build up the necessary research infrastructure to support further growth. Under pressure to keep up with the costs of maintaining both the physical and human capital necessary to sustain a robust research enterprise on top of the cost of tuition assistance, some HBCUs have been compelled to pursue the R1 designation. Like a bright light at the end of an expensive tunnel, the designation has come to represent the possibility of greater research cost recovery and purchasing power, in addition to prestige. But in chasing an ideal of research performance shaped by institutions unencumbered by a legacy of underinvestment, some observers have expressed concern that HBCUs may lose sight of their access-oriented missions.
A broader national conversation about how to better reward the engagement of non-R1s, and especially HBCUs, in the research ecosystem is necessary to address long-standing trends of inattention and underinvestment.
Prioritizing access to education and research is essential to the development of the US science and engineering workforce. Furthermore, given evidence of a stronger correlation between research expenditures and student retention at HBCUs than at other universities, there is still much to learn from the ways some under-resourced research institutions are managing to do more for their students with less.
The majority of US science and engineering degrees come from non-R1 universities. A crossover analysis of 2023 data from the Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey of the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) of the National Center for Education Statistics shows non-R1 universities conferred 26% of doctoral degrees, 43% of master’s degrees, 53% of bachelor’s degrees, and nearly 100% of associate’s degrees in science and engineering fields (Figure 1). A broader national conversation about how to better reward the engagement of non-R1s, and especially HBCUs, in the research ecosystem is necessary to address long-standing trends of inattention and underinvestment.
The cost of underinvestment
Non-R1s—and HBCUs in particular—are viewed by policymakers and leaders of national higher education consortia as pipelines for talent development, rather than as pathways for producers of cutting-edge research. This oversight has a long history. Since the Carter administration, which introduced the first executive order specific to HBCUs, each administration has either introduced, amended, or revoked standing orders that characterize the ways HBCUs are vital to the nation (Figure 2). Some administrations have gone so far as to codify into law the significance of HBCUs to national research goals and particular parts of the research enterprise. Despite the ways executive orders have been used to implement HBCU-specific policies, none have managed to actually center HBCUs within national research and innovation policy. Thus, patterns of underinvestment have persisted for many decades.
In 1972, non-HBCUs expended 98% more funding on research than HBCUs. Since then, total research expenditures have increased for all universities, compounding this gap to an enormous extent. Federal research expenditures by non-HBCUs for FY2023 ($59 billion) were approximately 111 times greater than those of HBCUs ($539 million). Since 1973, federal expenditures by HBCUs have never exceeded 2% of the total in any given year, and the share of HBCU nonfederal expenditures has barely exceeded 0.5% of the nonfederal total.
Maintaining a university research enterprise is an expensive endeavor. Capital assets are needed to support specific research and innovation infrastructure, including labs, equipment, and personnel. Over the last seven years, institutions participating in the NCSES Survey of Science and Engineering Research Facilities have reported costs of repairs and deferred maintenance for research facilities, along with how much space has been dedicated to research. Though the growth in the cost of deferred maintenance and the growth in physical space were similar for HBCUs and non-HBCUs, HBCUs report 50% more expenses in repairs of their research spaces (Figure 4).
What this means is that over the last decade, HBCUs have had to spend significantly more money just on upfitting or repairing their research facilities. Encumbered funding for repairs and renovations is money not invested in the necessary expenditures that support cutting-edge innovation, including new equipment and personnel.
A common way for universities to bring in revenue to support research costs is through patenting and commercializing technologies invented by university faculty and students. Many R1 universities are leaders in this effort; these institutions have formed robust enterprises to support the transfer of technologies into the marketplace. Although HBCU-affiliated inventors have been producing life-changing innovations for more than a century, HBCUs have generally lagged behind other universities in building up the necessary administrative infrastructure to capitalize on commercialization with comparable efficacy.
Stony the road to R1
Though every university has a slightly different path to the R1 designation, some patterns emerge. Unless a university can pull from its own institutional funds (including endowment income or gifts) or quickly raise nonfederal expenditures through corporate investment or state and local funds, institutions pursuing the R1 designation usually leverage federal dollars to build up research administration infrastructure and assets over the long-term. They do so by reinvesting recovered indirect costs from the federal government until they are able to sustain high levels of research activity through nonfederal sources.
In this way, access to federally supported research—and critically, the costs recovered from the federal government for facilities and administration—is essential to a university building up its research capacity. (Though every institution has a slightly different cost recovery, HBCUs and other MSIs have historically had much lower agreed-upon rates.)
Access to federally supported research—and critically, the costs recovered from the federal government for facilities and administration—is essential to a university building up its research capacity.
Analyzing patterns in the ways different universities marshal the necessary resources to achieve R1 status clarifies a disproportionate kind of investment required from access-oriented institutions, and especially HBCUs: time. Howard University’s journey to R1 status, granted in 2025, took nearly two generations. The university relied on federal research and development expenditures for about 40 years; it received R1 status one other time during that period (in 1987), only to have it revoked when the classifications were redesigned in 2005 (Figure 5). It was only during the mid-2010s that Howard’s nonfederal expenditures rate reached above 20%.
Consider this timeline alongside that of 2025 R1 designee American University, which was able to increase its nonfederal expenditures rate from 20% to 80% over less than five years (Figure 6). Or that of Florida International University, an access-oriented institution, which was granted R1 status in 2015 after gaining and losing it more than a decade before (Figure 7); or of the University of Texas at El Paso, which achieved R1 status in 2018 after 30 years, while continuing to offer open admissions.
The 2025 update to the Carnegie Classifications included major changes to the methodology for assigning research activity designations, establishing clearer thresholds for research expenditures and doctoral production compared to the prior principal component analysis system. The adjustments may create new roads for other HBCUs to attain R1 status, but the larger issues of systemic underinvestment remain.
The road to an R1 designation requires institutions to ramp up research expenditures and doctoral production, which pressures faculty and researchers to compete for more federal grants, which must be supported by a robust infrastructure of research administration capable of turning federally obligated grants into actual expenditures, which costs money to develop and maintain. The effort also requires strong leadership, which has a cost. This is a difficult path for most institutions, but for HBCUs with a historical disadvantage, stony is the road.
A call for structural commitment
As the case of HBCUs and MSIs demonstrates, systemic underinvestment in non-R1s holds these institutions back from providing research experiences to more Americans, ignores regional and community-based innovation, and leaves opportunities to advance national competitiveness on the table. Greater investment in the institutional capacity of non-R1s will support faculty development, laboratories, research data systems, and leadership development for the entire country. All non-R1s, including HBCUs and MSIs, should be rewarded for their potential as powerful engines of discovery and leadership in research—not simply as partners to better-resourced institutions.
The 2025 update to the Carnegie research designations and the addition of the Access and Earnings classification seek to support a broader narrative about not only which universities are involved in research activities, but also what it means to the students they serve longitudinally. As the landscape of federal funding for research at universities shifts, it is more important than ever to recognize the non-R1 institutions producing the lion’s share of America’s domestic STEM talent. Yet these institutions are the least likely to be invited to participate in national conversations about research and innovation policy. To fully realize the country’s potential, it is time to center investment in non-R1s as producers of knowledge—not just pathways to it.