Who's an R1? New Carnegie report

[mamselle]

Well, lab size is determined by Ph.D. admissions, and you have to have a critical mass to run labs, as well.

M.

[marshwiggle]

Well, lab size is determined by Ph.D. admissions, and you have to have a critical mass to run labs, as well.

M.

Not necessarily. You can run lower level labs with undergraduate TAs, and you can have senior labs run by instructors or paid staff, who do all of the grading. It's certainly convenient to have graduate TAs for everything, but it's not essential. (And of course, it's expensive to have full-time people as well, compared to grad students.)

[Puget]

Well, lab size is determined by Ph.D. admissions, and you have to have a critical mass to run labs, as well.

M.

Not necessarily. You can run lower level labs with undergraduate TAs, and you can have senior labs run by instructors or paid staff, who do all of the grading. It's certainly convenient to have graduate TAs for everything, but it's not essential. (And of course, it's expensive to have full-time people as well, compared to grad students.)

I think mamselle meant research labs, not teaching labs.
Yes, you need a certain number of grad students for research labs, but again, this is per lab-- so it is really relative not absolute numbers that matter for productivity. There may be some other benefits to having lots of total PhD students (more course offerings, or more chances to collaborate and socialize with other PhD students), but also benefits to being in a smaller program with potentially more individual attention.

[mamselle]

Yes, and perhaps to many schools aspiring to raise their profile/ratings/Ph.D. numbers, the idea of more grants and more overhead coming in have a degree of attraction as well.

M.

[marshwiggle]

Well, lab size is determined by Ph.D. admissions, and you have to have a critical mass to run labs, as well.

M.

Not necessarily. You can run lower level labs with undergraduate TAs, and you can have senior labs run by instructors or paid staff, who do all of the grading. It's certainly convenient to have graduate TAs for everything, but it's not essential. (And of course, it's expensive to have full-time people as well, compared to grad students.)

I think mamselle meant research labs, not teaching labs.

Doh! Occupational hazard of being a (teaching) lab instructor... I forget about those other things....

[Ruralguy]

I guess what I was getting at is which numbers are used for determining R1 status? Absolute numbers for school or per field? Or are any relative numbers, such as peer reviewed papers per PhD student graduated used?

Many sub fields do not need large labs, and some need no traditional lab space, though admittedly creating a complete  R1 grade dept. just for those fields would be difficult.  And some small labs, so to speak, have very high output for their size, but there is a limit to how much absolute out put the can have...100 low output people can put out more than one extremely high output person.

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

NDSU appears to have worked at coming back after dropping in 2015 by staffing their research office and grad school to support the increased activity in each area.

Drop in 2015; recovery in 2021; North Dakota
Sounds suspiciously like oil&gas industry

[Puget]

I guess what I was getting at is which numbers are used for determining R1 status? Absolute numbers for school or per field? Or are any relative numbers, such as peer reviewed papers per PhD student graduated used?

Many sub fields do not need large labs, and some need no traditional lab space, though admittedly creating a complete  R1 grade dept. just for those fields would be difficult.  And some small labs, so to speak, have very high output for their size, but there is a limit to how much absolute out put the can have...100 low output people can put out more than one extremely high output person.

From their methodology section:https://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/classification_descriptions/basic.php

Level of Research Activity

Institutions that conferred at least 20 research/scholarship doctorates in 2019-20 and reported at least $5 million in total research expenditures in FY20 were assigned to one of two categories based on a measure of research activity. The research activity index includes the following correlates of research activity: research & development (R&D) expenditures in science and engineering; R&D expenditures in non-S&E fields; S&E research staff (postdoctoral appointees and other non-faculty research staff with doctorates); doctoral conferrals in humanities, social science, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields, and in other fields (e.g., business, education, public policy, social work). The mapping of doctoral degrees to these four disciplinary clusters is available is document in this Excel file. These data were statistically combined using principal components analysis to create two indices of research activity reflecting the total variation across these measures (based on the first principal component in each analysis).

One index represents the aggregate level of research activity, and the other captures per-capita research activity using the expenditure and staffing measures divided by the number of full-time faculty within the assistant, associate, and full professor ranks. The values on each index were then used to locate each institution on a two-dimensional graph. We calculated each institution's distance from a common reference point (the minima of each scale), and then used the results to assign institutions to one of two groups based on their distance from the reference point. Thus the aggregate and per-capita indices were considered equally, such that institutions that were very high on either index were assigned to the "very high research activity" group, while institutions that were high on at least one (but very high on neither) were assigned to the "high research activity" group. Before conducting the analysis, raw data were converted to rank scores to reduce the influence of outliers and to improve discrimination at the lower end of the distributions where many institutions were clustered.

[Ruralguy]

Got it...so, as you said before, you can have highly productive individuals,  but if totals are too low in an absolute sense, you can fail to hit the mark. So, it makes sense that if they probably have no hope of consistently hitting the mark, they should rebrand.

[Wahoo Redux]

So, is the move to R1 considered a viable survival / sustainability strategy for the coming deluge?

[Hibush]

So, is the move to R1 considered a viable survival / sustainability strategy for the coming deluge?

Unlike going to D1 in the NCAA, being classified as R1 in the Carnegie classification is an the consequence of surviving very well.

[Puget]

In my STEM sub field, Brandeis had a small but solid program producing several successful people in the field . I think part of the issue is bunch hires in the Evelyn Handler days, now retiring, and not being replaced with equivalent people, at least not in enough fields at same level. I'm surprised they let this happen. They really wanted to get beyond that "safety school for Northeast Jewish kids" image and image of only having solid research in fields such as Judaic studies (Im a former kid, Jewish, from Northeast...didn't go to Brandeis). I think they succeeded, but it seems that for some reason, are faltering, at least on the research end for some programs.

Mostly it is just much, much smaller than the other R1s. It's hard to graduate enough PhDs to maintain R1 status at that overall size, even when per capita research productivity is really high.

And-- apparently there were data submission errors. Brandeis is back to R1 in the revision.

[Ruralguy]

It was a plausible hypothesis while it lasted, but I am not surprised it turned out to be false because the data were false.