The University of Texas at San Antonio now has a better idea where it stands against its national peers after securing a formal Research 1 designation from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education — a status it’s worked for years to attain.
Now, the work has begun to leverage that into new institutional alliances and expanded funding.
“The actual designation itself is just going to open up so many doors, these opportunities around strategic partnerships and collaboration that take advantage of two of our most important characteristics — as a Hispanic thriving institution and as research discovery enterprise,” UTSA President Taylor Eighmy said.
UTSA has recreated some of the principal component analysis used by Carnegie to classify institutions as R1 to gain a better idea of where it stands among some of the other universities that have secured the designation. It’s now in company with institutions such as Rice, Tufts, and Kansas State universities and Oregon State University, among others.
“It's amazing how well we compare to institutions that have been around twice as long as us,” Eighmy said. “Many of them are private institutions. Some of them have medical schools.”
It wasn’t so long ago some thought of UTSA as a large commuter school. Now, it’s entering a different stratosphere.
With its Carnegie designation, UTSA is now part of the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities, a group comprised of about 20 institutions in the U.S., according to Eighmy, that are recognized both as Hispanic serving by the Department of Education and as R1.
Eighmy expects the Carnegie decision will put UTSA in a position to work more closely with government officials. That could lead to additional public funding support — especially in the research arena.
The UTSA president said it could also drive more nonprofit and philanthropic support to the 52-year-old university, pointing to the $40 million gift UTSA received in June from author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott and husband Dan Jewett — even before the Carnegie designation.
“There are other organizations that want to follow in their footsteps in supporting institutions like us,” Eighmy said. “So, in some ways, all of this continues to open doors at an accelerated rate. That’s a huge part of this.”