Forty-two institutions added to the ranks of R1 designees

As the federal R&D budget has grown, peer review committee compositions changed, and federal research awards have grown in size, the threshold to obtain the designation as a Carnegie R1 university of $50 million in total research spending to earn the designation was met by 42 additional universities for the first time, bringing the total to 187 nationwide. New designees include San Diego State University, an SSTI member, and Howard University, the only historically Black college or university yet to receive the R1 designation.

The new 2025 Research Activity Designations list was recently published by the American Council on Education (ACE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Carnegie Foundation).  

Texas had the highest number of R1 institutions (16), followed by California and New York (14 and 12, respectively). Use Figure 1 below to search for the names and locations of all 2025 R1 and R2 Research Activity Designations. You can view all R1 and R2 institutions together or separately; you can also view new additions to these designations together or separately.

Figure 1: 2025 R1 and R2 Carnegie Classifications

There are three Carnegie research designations, as explained on the ACE’s FAQ page. “To achieve the R1 classification, a university must meet two criteria: spend at least $50 million on research and award 70 research doctorates annually. The 2025 Research Activity Designations use the higher of a three-year average (2021, 2022, 2023) or the most recent single-year data (2023).

“The threshold for Research 2 (R2) classification, to spend on average at least $5 million on R&D per year and award at least 20 research doctorates, is unchanged. The new classification for research colleges and universities requires that on average in a single year, these institutions spend at least $2.5 million on R&D. Institutions in the R1 and R2 categories are not included.”

A fact sheet with more details about the current and historical methodology for determining research activity designations can be found here.

Spending data is taken from the Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey for FY2021, FY2022, and FY2023 and reflects the total research and development expenditures. Research doctorate awards are taken from data reported to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) for academic years 2020-21, 2021-22, and 2022-23. Research doctorates include all degrees reported as a Doctor’s Degree—Research/Scholarship in IPEDS, following the IPEDS definition. [Note: $900 million in Department of Education contracts related to IPEDS and NCES were canceled in recent days in the Trump Administration’s efforts to reduce federal spending, potentially impacting the ability to calculate research designations in the future.]