On February 1, WVU was recognized among the universities with the highest level of research activity in the nation.
The “R1” designation acknowledges an enduring, institution-wide commitment to constructive thinking. It may also boost the land grant mission of economic development.
What makes a great research university? More than likely, it’s the same things that make a great book publisher or a great circus: creative minds out front but, at least as important, savvy administration backing them up.
What’s certain, though, is that a great research university has to do a lot of research. And in February 2016, WVU was classified R1: Highest Research Activity, with just 114 other universities nationwide—rubbing shoulders with the likes of Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and Caltech. It’s a quick realization of an aspiration WVU set in 2010 under then-President James Clements as part of its 10-year strategic plan: “WVU will attain and maintain the highest Carnegie research ranking by 2020.”
Students, alumni, and West Virginians everywhere cheered the announcement. Facebook users shared Morgantown magazine’s post on the topic more than 500 times. “Proud of my alma mater,” wrote one Twitter user. “That’s excellent news, and a testament to excellent leadership,” gushed another. “This is a big deal,” a third enthused.
It is a big deal. “Carnegie is one of the true classifications,” says WVU President E. Gordon Gee, who noted that this reclassification from R2, calculated from 2013-14 data, reflects things in place before he came on in 2014. “It gives you a real snapshot of where universities stand comparatively.”
Here’s the thing. R1 is not a ranking, as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has insisted since it established its classification system in the 1970s. WVU’s R1 designation doesn’t mean it’s “better” than R2 universities. The Carnegie Classification system’s 33 categories are meant to be neutrally descriptive—to classify the nation’s 4,600-plus institutions of higher education, everything from small liberal arts schools to internet-only colleges to faith-related institutions, so researchers of higher education can compare apples to apples. Carnegie bristles at the use of words like “elite” in reference to R1 and at schools’ attempts to move from one category to another. It wants to characterize the system, not influence it.
But let’s be realistic. For those dozen or so universities that find themselves at the margin between R1 and R2 from one five-year Carnegie Classification update to the next, it’s inevitable that they would view the respected policy and research center’s formula as prescriptive rather than descriptive—as a recipe for growing a research program.
Tweaking the Formula
We might date WVU’s R1 aspiration to February 27, 2006—the day the 2005 update was published, reclassifying WVU from R1 to R2. It didn’t mean WVU had gone downhill. It simply followed from a change in formula, and a quick look at that makes the 2015 reclassification more clear.
Before 2000, Carnegie based its classification of doctoral universities on a straightforward number for federal research spending: Universities that got the most federal funding placed in R1, WVU included. It was an approach that privileged large institutions and those that do the kinds of research that cost a lot, an official explained to Inside Higher Ed in 2006, but undervalued intimate settings and less technical research that might also be very productive. To make the 2000 update more meaningful, but still trying for a simple metric, the organization used numbers of doctoral degrees conferred instead. WVU remained R1.
But that approach placed too little emphasis on actual research, the organization decided. So for its 2005 update it came out with a more nuanced, though less transparent, formula (see sidebar on page 55 for details). That’s when WVU fell out of R1.
“Of course, I wasn’t here,” says Gee, who was president at Vanderbilt University in Nashville at the time. “But I know it certainly motivated WVU to focus on a very clear research strategy.”
The R1 designation WVU has regained is more meaningful than the one it fell from a decade ago. It’s also a far smaller group—we could, at risk of offending Carnegie, say “more exclusive”—down from 151 in 2000 to 115 now.
The Current Doctoral University Formula
While Carnegie tweaks parts of its approach with each five-year update, the formula behind the doctoral universities has been stable since the 2005 revision. Here’s how it works. Every school that grants at least 20 Ph.D.s, not including professional degrees, is considered a doctoral university. That came to 335 institutions in the 2015 update, the most ever.
For each of those institutions, Carnegie gathers numbers in three areas. To oversimplify a little:
- research and development expenditures,
- science and engineering research staff, and
- doctoral degrees.
Money, staffing, degrees. Peeking behind the curtain, it’s easy to see why Carnegie doesn’t want its categories seen as ranks—the formula doesn’t evaluate the quality of research or its significance. It’s truly about scale.
So what it means for WVU to be classified as an R1 institution is that, among the 335 U.S. schools that granted at least 20 doctoral degrees in 2013-14, WVU’s research activity was somewhere among the 115 that had the highest amount of spending, staffing, and doctoral degrees granted.
Where was WVU among the pack? Carnegie doesn’t publish its calculated indices, but to look at just one component, WVU was above the bottom one-fifth of the 115 R1 schools in research expenditures in 2013-14 (see Figure 2).
Savvy Administration
WVU’s 2020 Strategic Plan set excellence in research as one overarching goal. To get there, the university targeted a small number of specific research areas—places where it would concentrate capital campaign efforts, improve facilities, and increase faculty.
“They fall under three areas of emphasis for the university,” says WVU Vice President for Research Fred King. One is improving the health of the state’s residents. “That includes, for example, the National Institutes of Health clinical and translational research award,” he says, referring to a 2012 $20 million grant to speed research results to those suffering from diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. A second is education, with emphasis on STEM education and science literacy—built, for example, into a competitive 2015 National Science Foundation project WVU is collaborating on with Marshall and West Virginia State universities. And a third is improving quality of life for residents in the state, “including water quality and water stewardship,” King says, “and you see it through the Energy Institute, where we’re looking at how we make the most of our natural resources.”
It was a wise approach, Gee says. “Rather than trying to be all things to all people, they identified areas of real opportunity to be very competitive and to leapfrog a number of other institutions.”
The university openly aimed to regain R1 status. “Predictive modeling of the achievements necessary to gain the Carnegie ranking (R1: Highest Research Activity) was completed,” reads a report of one 2012 meeting. So it dialed up the research funding effort. “We put in place some mechanisms to help faculty be more successful: grant-writing workshops, for example,” King says. Total research expenditures rose from $155 million in fiscal 2010 to $164 million in 2014—directly boosting the Carnegie “money” metric. It increased the number of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, from 148 in 2009 to 159 in 2014—that’s “staffing.” And doctoral programs grew, raising completions from 166 in 2010 to 183 in 2014—that’s “degrees.”
On the one hand, this is just what Carnegie wants to avoid: universities picking its formula apart and directing efforts to its component parts. On the other, the drive to R1 is embedded in a genuine university-wide commitment to elevating WVU’s productivity and relevance. The university updated infrastructure. “You see over the past decade new facilities at engineering, a new life sciences building, new space for the Department of Physics, soon a new agriculture building,” says King, to name just a few structures. Initiatives like tighter partnerships with the corporate world connect students with internship opportunities and keep faculty research interests grounded in reality. Entrepreneurship is now woven throughout the university, and a more muscular commercialization program stands ready to help faculty and students apply for patents and work through licensing innovations and creating spin-offs.
Widespread confidence in WVU’s direction blew the State of Minds capital campaign right past its $750 million goal more than a year ahead of schedule in 2014, allowing the university to reach instead for $1 billion—four times the Building Greatness campaign of 1998 to 2003 and a goal it’s already nearly met.
How Being R1 Helps
“This is a reflection of lots of good work by lots of good people,” says Clay Marsh, executive dean of the School of Medicine, when asked about R1. He and other campus leaders emphasize the excellence and dedication behind the designation. “It recognizes academic achievement and research and scholarship across the board,” says Eberly School of Arts and Sciences Dean Gregory Dunaway.
Beyond an acknowledgement of past achievements, though, everyone agrees R1 will intensify the university’s momentum. One obvious way it will do that is by attracting the highest-caliber faculty because, as Marsh says, people are attracted to places of high reputation. King agrees, noting that “it raises the awareness of the public outside the state in terms of quality of the institution.” Gee goes further still: “It shows that WVU has entered into the front ranks of American institutions and in that it is an enormously important recruiting tool.”
That affects the student body. “When you attract the best faculty you attract the best students,” Gee says. “Our applications are up 31 percent, and the entering (2016-17) class will be not only the largest in the history of the university but also the most academically qualified.”
It also helps faculty make the case for more research funding. “Name recognition is an important part of the decision-making process by both federal agencies and industry, although it is usually not spelled out,” says Xingbo Liu, a professor of materials science and associate chair of research in the Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources. Liu, himself a researcher, sees other subtle possibilities.
Xingbo Liu, professor of materials science and associate chair of research, WVU Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources
It might even bolster the university’s image of itself. “I often say that I have been president of a number of institutions that are not nearly as good as they think they are and I am now president of an institution that is better than it thinks it is,” Gee says. “This is a remarkable achievement for a public research land grant institution that is meeting all the various expectations that come with that, in a very small state.”
Ultimately, the R1 designation may serve the modern land grant mission of solving the state’s problems and increasing its prosperity. “When you think about some of the most prosperous areas of the country—Silicon Valley, Stanford and Berkeley, the Boston area—having a great research university really can be an attractor and a driver of the economy,” King says.
Marsh has powerful words for it: “It’s an accelerant to our progress in creating the kind of service to our state that changes everything for people.”
