Originally Posted by
GermDawg
It all has to do with that Indiana University Carnegie classification, we had been R2 (Higher Research Activity), for some reason we dropped to R3 (Moderate Research Activity) in their 2015 update. ULL stayed in the R2 group but we're now in the R3, same group with ULM. The issue is they basically have 2 factors that they scatter plot all of the universities against and then split them evenly into 3 groups. It's per capita research vs aggregate research, and the line for each class moves when they do the plot to split it up evenly. ULL get's a significant bump due to the sizable chunk of Wetlands research that is perpetual and it keeps them in the middle of the cluster. Either way it sucks that we dropped but I think with all of the recent Cyber research and contracts along with some new Biomed stuff we should get back in when they look at the data in 2020.
They also think this is a reason we will lose the the USNews Tier 1 ranking, which may be true since USNews states:
But their are quite a few R3 universities Tier 1 so it's not a given that we'll drop.