What’s Missing From Research Metrics

In “Stony the Road We Trod: The Tradeoffs Universities Face in Chasing the R1 Designation” (Issues, Fall 2025), Erin Lynch’s analysis especially resonates for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), whose research achievements have long outpaced their financial support. I offer these reflections to extend her argument and surface dimensions of the R1 journey that deserve greater national attention.

Here at Howard and at many other schools that enroll a significant percentage of students from historically marginalized groups, the pursuit of R1 status is not merely about securing more research funding. It is a constant drive to improve underlying “sustainability metrics,” which are key to building the capacity of our research infrastructure, administration, data systems, and people. The standard metrics used as shorthand for research strength—total expenditures and doctoral completions—obscure the reality that many HBCUs manage thousands of complex projects despite their reduced resources.

One key metric of disparity is in the level of faculty research support available. HBCU faculty must navigate proposal development, compliance, contracting, and post-award management with minimal help from departmental staff, who routinely handle these functions at better-resourced institutions. This drives an overreliance on central offices for both localized support and institutional oversight, slowing research activity and creating persistent backlogs. These results highlight the structural underfunding issue and emphasize the need to look beyond R1 metrics to enhance the success of HBCUs embarking on the R1 journey.

Lynch correctly noted that Howard’s return to R1 status required increasing nonfederal research expenditures, but another critical part of the equation was a comprehensive rebuilding of the research enterprise. She also highlights the historic underinvestment in HBCU research, which helps explain a critical gap these schools face in subsidizing the indirect costs of research. Lower research expenditures have led to far fewer facilities and administrative (F&A) dollars available for reinvestment, contributing to stark differences in research space, systems, and administrative capacity. HBCUs’ calculated and actual F&A recovery rates are often significantly lower than those of non-HBCUs, making it exceptionally hard to cover all the indirect costs associated with an R1 research enterprise.

More scholarship is needed on sustainability metrics to inform policy that addresses the structural funding gaps shaping research capacity across institutional types. These metrics—award setup time, trained departmental support, contracting and subaward cycle time, consistency of indirect cost returns, and modern research administration systems—are less visible but are the rails on which R1 research moves and determine whether an institution can stay on the R1 trajectory.

Meanwhile, HBCUs deliver outcomes rarely rewarded in research metrics: social mobility for first-generation and lower-income students, community-engaged scholarship, and leadership pathways across the public and health sectors. As research expectations grow, the same limited resources stretch across instruction, service, and research support.

The nation must address these historic challenges to ensure that HBCUs play an expanded role in supporting long-term research goals, increasing the pipeline of future researchers that well-resourced institutions don’t have the capacity to admit, and improving outcomes for their local communities. Using sustainability metrics to guide targeted policy and equitable investment in these institutions can make their R1 journey less stony.

Marchon Jackson

Every US president since the Carter administration, including the current Trump administration, has signed an executive order supporting the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities, as Erin Lynch describes. For decades, HBCUs have also enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress. Today, these financially under-resourced institutions overperform in producing the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics talent crucial for the United States to maintain its advantage in global strategic competition. And they have even more to offer.

In a given year, the dynamic HBCU research and development enterprise comprises 35 to 45 institutions, executing roughly $500 million in federally sponsored R&D. While considerable, this amounts to about 1% of the nation’s annual $50 billion R&D expenditure for higher education; about one penny of every dollar spent. Even at this rate, a recent study predicts that by 2030 there will be three HBCUs that hold the Carnegie Classification R1 label denoting “very high research activity,” and 19 HBCUs will hold the Carnegie R2 classification denoting “high research activity.” Thus, HBCUs have evolved from their first stage, intensely focused on their founders’ mission, through a period of increased federal support for R&D, and are now set for a third act: HBCU 3.0.

This HBCU 3.0 future will rely on fortifying the R&D enterprise to produce returns to invest in infrastructure, faculty, research administration, and curriculum development. A robust enterprise that drives innovation, commercialization, and entrepreneurship will help research discovery go from the laboratory to market, expanding research capacity, economic prosperity, and national security. In addition, enhanced focus on increasing endowment income could provide resources to boost the HBCU 3.0 vision. As of 2023, income from returns on university endowment funds comprised 23% to 40% of yearly R&D expenditures for R1 institutions (depending on their R&D budgets). HBCU totals lag better-resourced institutions, and the gap in endowment income is among the most significant barriers to growing HBCU R&D investments. In response, Congress should adopt a legislative agenda focused on promoting top-tier research status for HBCUs, which can drive market-based return on research investment and increased endowment income dedicated to growing and sustaining the R&D enterprise.

Today, tension rightfully exists between the historical mission of HBCUs and a future of tech-driven expansion of the R&D enterprise focused on commercializing emerging technology. But pursuing both paths is both possible and necessary. Reaching HBCU 3.0 will require visionary leadership, at HBCUs and at the federal level, to stake a large part of the future on markets, partnerships, and opportunities that haven’t yet materialized.

This is exactly the type of belief that inspired the founders of these institutions over a century ago, confident in a mission to forge a future for post-secondary education for all that did not exist in their time. Actions must be taken now to evolve an HBCU 3.0 vision that synthesizes continued federal support with expanded market presence of the R&D enterprise to produce returns that can sustain the impact of the historical mission of these institutions for generations to come.

Jaret C. Riddick