It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as several decades for higher education: colleges hyperfocusing on climbing the tiers of the Carnegie Classifications, a frequently used system of categorizing like institutions that debuted in 1973.
This dynamic is most frequently on display when colleges with doctoral programs try to hop into the Research 2, or R2, ranking — which designates institutions with high levels of research activity — or when they’re trying to move from R2 to R1, the top tier of institutions with very high research levels.
