BYU poised to become an R1 research school

[DrStakhanovite]

If those are the criteria then I reckon all German universities must be R1 by considerable margins, like factors of two to four or more. It’s a different system here.

The Higher Education industry in the U.S. simultaneously craves hierarchies while also seeking to abolish them. The organization that decides which institution gets the designation of “R1” is a non-profit/non-government organization made up of a bunch of participating colleges and universities. The designation was originally conceived of as an easy way for people outside the industry to know which schools were spending the most resources on research, but it eventually became just another promotional/recruiting tool.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, it turned out that the wealthiest schools spent the most on research. Considering that many of the “elite” institutions have endowments with a larger monetary value than some of the GDPs of European countries (*cough*Harvard*cough*), the R1 list isn’t going to expand much and will only contain the kind of institutions one would expect to see on there anyways.

A school like BYU just isn’t going to catch up (unless the Church decided to start pouring billions of dollars into it) and to make the R1 designation easier to obtain, the decision was made to simply say, “spend 50 million on research and kick out 70 PhDs a year regardless of what other institutions are spending or how many PhDs they churn out and we’ll give you the designation so you can start including it on you recruitment material.”

Easily over a 100 schools are gonna qualify for R1 now and every single one of them will act as if this was an achievement on their part.

[Physics Guy]

Harvard is pretty crazy, all right, with its market-movingly enormous endowment. I think Harvard employs world-leading researchers in pretty much the way that an old-money family buys art. They know what they're doing. They have good taste and they're shrewd, and they care. It's still a bit of a game.

If Harvard is a Boston Brahmin, though, MIT is another kind of traditional New England character—the hard-nosed Yankee trader. At least from what I remember being told, MIT doesn't have much of an endowment at all, for its size, but lives hand-to-mouth, paycheck-to-paycheck on grant overhead.

Grant overhead is the cut that your institution gets when you bring in a research grant. The reasoning is that if you as a professor undertake to perform such-and-such a study, if you can get so many grant dollars to pay research assistant salaries and buy that gadget, then in fact you're only going to be able to do that study with those resources because the university is giving you office space and electricity and stuff. So if those university assets are now going to be tapped to produce this valuable study, then the university ought to get a share of the grant. So it does. It's like taxes.

It's usually not that your grant money arrives and the university takes out 15%, though. It's typically that when you submit your grant proposal, the university makes you add 15% overhead to the amount you request. The exact amounts of overhead can vary from university to university, and perhaps even from department to department. Being at a university with a lower overhead rate can mean that more of your grant applications will be approved, because you won't have to ask for quite as much money, from the granting agency, to provide the same results.

In a research-intensive university, grant overhead can be a significant part of the operating budget. And this is on top of the fact that most of the research activity at a research university is financially supported by grants from external funding agencies rather than from the university itself as a corporation. So being rich, in the sense of having a large endowment or commanding high tuition fees, can certainly help produce lots of research, but you can also do it the hard way, by winning a lot of grant money.