San Diego State University’s fast and focused effort to become classified as a Research 1 school has paid off with its addition to an elite list of science-heavy institutions that includes Harvard, MIT, Caltech and UC San Diego.
SDSU was added to that list Thursday by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which said the school had met the two primary criteria for “R1” status: It spends at least $50 million on research and development, and it awards at least 70 doctoral research-scholarship degrees.
A school can meet that goal based on its most recent year of data or on a three-year rolling average, according to Carnegie, which classifies the nature of all types of colleges, universities and institutes with help from the American Council on Education.
SDSU actually met the criteria in 2023, but Carnegie only periodically updates its list of R1 schools — a list that has had fewer than 150 members nationwide in recent years.
“R1 status enhances out ability to secure increased funding, attract talent and expand interdisciplinary collaborations,” Hala Madanat, SDSU’s vice president for research and innovation, said in a statement. “While the focus is certainly on federal funding, R1s are able to attract higher levels of private-sector grants. Moving to R1 is not just a milestone, it’s a launch pad.”
For many years, SDSU held the far lower classification of R2, which denotes schools that spend $5 million or more on research and award at least 20 doctoral research degrees.
The university was unhappy with that designation. It wanted to be known not only as a key part of San Diego County’s huge science community but as a player on the national level.
This led economist Adela de la Torre, who became SDSU’s president in 2018, to deepen and accelerate the school’s efforts to win research grants and to hire faculty as interested in research as they are in teaching — the latter being the main mission of the California State University system.
In a departure from the past, pressure to seek grants was also placed on faculty in the humanities and social sciences, not just those in fields such as biology, chemistry and engineering.
De la Torre also played a key role in convincing Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign legislation in 2023 that gave CSU campuses the right to offer independent doctorates. Those degrees had historically been the domain of the University of California system under the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education.
At de la Torre’s urging, the state also gave SDSU $80 million to help build a STEM education center in Brawley that will train residents of Imperial County to help mine and refine lithium, a key component in the batteries that power electric vehicles. The center will open later this year.
These various undertakings enabled SDSU to obtain a record $230 million in research funding for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2024 — almost $38 million more than it raised a year earlier. SDSU now says it might be able to hit $300 million in annual funding within the next six years.
“Reaching R1 is not about a title, it’s about impact,” de la Torre said in a statement. “It means more opportunities for our students, more breakthroughs from our researchers and more ways to serve our communities.”
The push reflects a long-term vision established in the 1980s by the university’s then-president Thomas B. Day, who strongly believed that faculty members should be scholars as well as teachers. Day said that research enhanced teaching and benefited society — a belief opposed by many faculty at the time.
Today, the model is in widespread use — which pleases Day’s son, Adam Day, the chief administrative officer of the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation.
“I know my father would be proud,” Day told the Union-Tribune Wednesday in a text message. “He knew where SDSU could and needed to go.”