University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) administrators told the Board of Regents on Friday that they believe UAF is set to become a top-tier research institution in 2030.
That year corresponds to the later of two timeframes the university has been eyeing since it launched a concerted push for Research 1 (R1) status. One of the goals in the UAF Strategic Plan is to achieve the status by 2027.
The designation comes from the Carnegie Classification System, which qualifies about 4% of U.S. universities – 187 of them – as R1. UAF is currently one of the 139 universities designated as R2.
UAF says becoming an R1 school would significantly boost its impact locally, statewide and beyond, creating hundreds of new jobs and attracting more students and elite researchers. The institution requested $20 million from the state to support the effort in 2024, ultimately receiving about $12.5 million.
Universities must meet certain thresholds to achieve the top tier, including spending $50 million on research annually and graduating an average of 70 PhD students each year. The Carnegie system evaluates universities on three-year cycles, with the next two of those ending in 2027 and 2030.
UAF Vice Chancellor of Research Laura Connor said Friday the graduation numbers don’t look like they’ll add up for the earlier cycle. But she said she doesn’t think federal headwinds will impact research dollars enough to foil UAF’s efforts, and that PhD recruitment is headed in the right direction.
“Even in the face of federal uncertainty, I don’t think that that’s going to be a problem going forward. We’re trying to just increase the number of PhD students, and I think we’re well on track to reach the 2030 mark,” she said.
At over $200 million, UAF has a research budget more than four times Carnegie system’s minimum for R1.
Across the entire UA system, the Trump administration has frozen, delayed or terminated about $63 million in federal grants supporting research. Less than $7 million of that total has been cancelled to date, according to a UA grants portfolio overview, although staff who prepared the overview wrote that they don’t expect the university will receive about $12 million in delayed grants.
In addition to maintaining research expenditures, UAF still needs to double its average annual PhD graduates to meet the Carnegie standards for R1. The Fairbanks institution had about 320 PhD students enrolled as of the Spring semester, according to a Spring R1 update, which said UAF would have to graduate 179 of its PhDs over the next couple years to attain the top tier status in the three-year cycle ending in 2027.
Connor said Friday that, to hit the Carnegie system’s minimum number in the 2030 cycle, “the most important thing is to keep making sure that we have ways to support those students so that they can stay on track and complete in their target timelines.”
Other UAF leaders also told the board that they were looking for ways to continue improving recruitment and accelerating graduation rates. Owen Guthrie, the vice chancellor of student affairs and enrollment management, said UAF enrolled about 70 students this Fall semester, which he called a record.
He told the board that the institution can continue increasing incoming PhDs by accepting more applicants than the number of positions available. Guthrie said that’s because not every PhD who is admitted chooses to enroll.
“Next year, the goal is to admit slightly more than the number of vacancies so that we have a higher rate of filling those spots,” he said.
As for those already enrolled, UAF Interim Chancellor Mike Sfraga floated the idea of changing internal processes to speed up the rate at which students graduate. He pointed to the existing, 10-year limit that students at the university have to earn their PhD as an example, suggesting that could be tightened.
“We need to look at that as an institution. Do we really want to have a 10-year window for students to complete a PhD?” he said. “Some students are going to school, [and] they’ve got families. We get it. But we need to take an internal look.”