Executive Summary

Since 2015, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education has used a set of calculations based on a host of criteria—such as research expenditures, number of faculty, doctoral degrees conferred, and number of PhD research staff—to determine its highly coveted R1 (“very high research activity”) top-tier research classification. Starting in 2025, CCIHE will drastically simplify the criteria. The new threshold for achieving R1 will simply be spending $50 million on research and development (R&D) and awarding 70 doctoral degrees in any research field—all within a year.

Congress has long recognized the strategic importance of increasing the defense research capacity of minority-serving institutions, and it recently enacted a law with the goal of encouraging the highest performers among these institutions, including eligible historically Black colleges and universities, to achieve R1 status. Section 223 of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act authorizes the Department of Defense (DOD) to use a portion of the billions of dollars it spends annually on higher education R&D to expand the defense research capacity at the nation’s minority-serving institutions and encourage them to strive for R1 status.¹ Although the changes to the CCIHE criteria slated for 2025 intend to uplift a range of R&D efforts across the country’s diverse higher education landscape, the implications for the nation’s HBCUs are unclear.

This policy brief addresses the question of how the original goals for HBCU progress supported by Section 223 translate to the new criteria for achieving R1 status adopted in 2025. The Section 223 law relies on the 2015 classification criteria to develop “measurable” progress toward top-tier research status.² This raises concern about the impact of the new 2025 criteria on the key goal of Section 223: to expand defense research capacity by encouraging eligible HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions to achieve R1 status. Here, we analyze data on research expenditures and PhD conferrals for R1 and R2 universities, according to the 2015 CCIHE criteria, and we analyze a snapshot of the 11 R2 HBCUs from 2021, in the context of the newly simplified 2025 criteria.

Several key recommendations emerge from the analysis presented here:

1. Revisit Section 223. Congress, the DOD, and HBCU leadership together should revisit the goals and objectives of Section 223 to develop strategies for investment, programming, and sustainment based on the CCIHE classification criteria being adopted in 2025.
2. Increase the proportion of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics research PhDs. For the key objectives of both achieving and sustaining R1 status, strategies for eligible R2 HBCUs should focus on increasing the proportion of STEM research PhD degrees to greater than 33 percent, with 45 percent as a goal.
3. Increase the proportion of institutional expenditures. To address the gap between R2 HBCUs and highly successful R1 institutions, R2 HBCUs focused on top-tier research status should increase the proportion of institutional funding of R&D, largely driven by endowment income, to levels of 30 percent or greater.
4. Close the funding gaps. To achieve goals of Section 223, for those institutions closest to 70 research PhD conferrals per year, near-term infusions of state and local R&D funding can provide a bridge to developing long-term strategies to grow the proportion of institutional funding.

1. National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024, Pub. L. No. 118-31, 118 Stat. 135 (2023).
2. NDAA (2023).