The Carnegie Paradox: Mission-Centered Institutions and the Realities of Striving for R2
The Carnegie Classification system was not designed to rank institutions or gatekeep resources. Yet for many colleges and universities, particularly those whose university mission center access, equity, and student success, that is precisely what the system has become. A 2024 white paper published by the American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation, authored by Felecia Commodore of Old Dominion University, documents this tension based on interviews with faculty and administrators of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The findings have implications that extend well beyond the HBCU sector. What the Research Found Commodore’s paper identifies a fundamental misalignment between what the Carnegie Classification system rewards, and what many mission-centered institutions are built to do.
HBCU faculty described carrying 4/4 teaching loads alongside large advising responsibilities. This nature of this workload reflects commitment to student success but leaves little room for the grant activity and research production that R2 requires. It reminds us that low research productivity does not demonstrate poor effort or ambition. Rather, it is a structural tension built into institutions whose founding purpose is different from the research universities on which the Carnegie metrics were normed. The consequences for institutions are significant. Participants described R2 functioning as a “velvet rope,” restricting access to NSF and NIH funding, research partnerships, and institutional credibility. One participant noted that when serving on NSF grant panels, reviewers questioned whether HBCU institutions had the capacity to conduct the research.
This Is Not Only an HBCU Challenge
The tension Commodore documents is shared by a broad range of institutions whose missions prioritize access and student success over research production. Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) carry community-centered missions and chronic underfunding that make research infrastructure investment genuinely difficult. Similarly, Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), many of them regional comprehensives serving large first-generation student populations, face the same faculty workload dynamics and the same mission-striving tension. Regional comprehensive universities typically hold strong teaching identities that create internal friction when institutional leadership pursues research designation. Across all of these institution types, the pattern is consistent: the Carnegie system rewards what well-resourced research universities do by design, and asks mission-centered institutions to compete on terms that were not designed for them.
What Institutions Considering R2 Should Know
None of this means that mission-centered institutions should not pursue R2. For many, the designation is a matter of equity as much as ambition, a way to access resources that have been inequitably withheld. The path requires honest engagement with several questions.
Is the institution pursuing R2 for the right reasons? The most sustainable R2 journeys are driven by a genuine commitment to building research capacity in service of the institution’s mission, not by prestige alone.
Does the strategy account for faculty reality? Asking faculty to grow research productivity without addressing teaching loads, advising burdens, and administrative demands is not a sustainable or effective strategy.
Does the institution’s R2 ambition have broad internal legitimacy? Faculty who feel that research-striving conflicts with their student-centered identity will not sustain the effort. Internal alignment matters as much as external strategy.
Is the institution utilizing its strengths, and not abandoning them? The most compelling R2 journeys at mission-centered institutions are ones where research grows out of existing commitments, community-engaged scholarship, scholarship of teaching and research and student-faculty collaboration, rather than grafting a research university model onto a fundamentally different kind of institution.
The 2025 update of the Carnegie Classification System introduced greater transparency with a new RCU designation that recognizes institutions previously invisible to the framework. The 2025 update opens the door for RCUs to purse R2 classification. Walking through it, in a way that is sustainable, mission-aligned, and honest about the structural challenges ahead, is the work that will help institutions realize their ambition.
This piece draws on “The Classification Paradox: Historically Black Colleges’ and Universities’ Complex Relationship and Inequitable Experiences with the Carnegie Classification System” by Felecia Commodore, published by the American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2024.