Why do most US regional colleges/universities/institutions have poor reputations in academic circles?

Question

I'm at the tail end of my Ph.D. at an R2 institution that's considered a regional institution in the United States. I attended a regional university for my undergrad at an R2. I did my Master's at a well-known regional college. I really wanted to do a Ph.D. At the time, I didn't know about the stigma regional institutions carry in the United States.

Why is this the case? Why is it that regional institutions are frowned upon in academic circles? I also find it confusing since many of those regional institutions have professors who graduated from big R1s themselves for their Ph.D. or even post-doc. If they're the ones training regional college students, why are the expected outcomes different compared to the bigger institutions?

To me, a key benefit of regional institutions is more individualized attention due to smaller class sizes. This was the major reason I attended my regional college since I graduated from high school with a class of 8 people and it would've been too much of a culture shock to go to a school with 50k undergrad. Small liberal arts colleges (SLACs) were out of the question since they were unaffordable even with scholarships.

I've heard reasons for regional colleges' bad reputation all across the board from high acceptance rates to suboptimal graduation rates, or to not being known to most graduate schools in the United States. Are all of those reasons true? Or, is there more to the story?

Answer 1

My perspective is that of a mathematician who went to an elite small liberal arts college (SLAC) as an undergraduate and taught as a graduate student and in temporary positions at an R1 and an elite SLAC before my current tenure track and then tenured position at an R2. I was a top 10% but not top 2% student in mathematics as an undergraduate at my college.

Regional universities have poor reputations because they have lower standards for passing classes and graduating, particularly on expectations for creativity and originality (as opposed to memorization of facts and procedures).

As a poor attempt at wit, I sometimes say that regional universities end up providing their students with their third middle school education, not a university education (because that's what their students expect and are capable of).

I sometimes teach a course on Abstract Algebra - a required course for the theoretical mathematics track of our mathematics major as well as for our mathematics education majors. Here it is mostly taken by seniors. I took it as a junior with classmates who were mostly sophomores and juniors. The material we covered in one semester here was covered in half a semester where I was an undergraduate so we ended up covering the second half of the course I took as an undergraduate as an additional elective here.

While the passing students here have learned the same facts and procedures as the students in the course I took, I was expected as an undergraduate to be able to use these facts to answer questions different from questions I had been explicitly taught to answer. Here that is expected of the best students but not all students, and at many regional universities (for which I only have indirect experience as someone who occasionally teaches and advises graduate students coming from such universities) that seems to be not expected of students at all.

While they have memorized more facts, the average graduating math major here is about as capable of solving a problem they were not explicitly taught to as I was at age 14 (and nowadays 14-year-old me could look up those facts on Wikipedia as necessary). The average graduating Ph.D. here is about as capable as I was in my junior year of college (and my senior thesis was more original, though a smaller body of work, than their Ph.D. dissertations).

It is definitely true that the professors at a regional university are capable of teaching classes at the same pace and expectations as classes at top universities. However, they don't. If I taught at the same pace at which I was taught as an undergraduate, almost none of my students would learn anything - it would just be too much material too fast for them. If I had the same expectations as I was held to as an undergraduate (and I did not think those expectations were particularly high at the time - after all over 90% of my classmates graduated!), only about half my seniors would pass - and keep in mind these are students who have passed several years of classes and chosen a comparatively difficult major. Given the selection effect, probably only 15-20% of the entering undergraduate students would have been able to graduate given the standards expected of me as an undergraduate. In the US system, no university with a 20% graduation rate could survive.

We occasionally get graduate students whose recommendation letters say they were the best student this decade at their regional university, and we find out when they get here that they would not have passed the junior and senior level courses at my undergraduate (and cannot keep up with even our relatively easy graduate program). Their undergraduate courses had such low expectations (because they had no students who could exceed those expectations) that their professors never found out if they had the originality and creativity necessary to succeed in graduate study.

Answer 2

There is no "bad reputation." The number of universities in the United States that have a "bad reputation" is very small.

Causes of bad reputation are:

• Bankruptcy, which is increasingly common
• For-profit business model, which is getting rarer
• Very low graduation rates
• Extreme political views

99% universities are not the top 1%, so they do not have the elitist reputation of the top 1%.

Answer 3

First, it could be good to look in to the definition of R1 and R2 universities.

See Carnegie Classification Methodology PDF for 2022 and the website. They basically do PCA on the cumulative doctorates awarded and per capita research expenditures at each institution with >20 PhDs/year and >$5 million in external funding.

Their data sources are available and the summary statistics can be found here. They do consider and weigh science and engineering vs non-science and engineering separately, but are combined via the PCA for analysis. For the sake of comparison, let's look at the science and engineering analysis. The two factors with the highest loading are:

• Median full-time research staff per faculty (explains 71% of the variance of the per-capita differences)
  • R1: 0.3
  • R2: 0.0
• Median total STEM PhDs per institution per year (explains 70% of the variance of the to total institutional differences)
  • R1: 158
  • R2: 17

So the major difference between R1 and R2 is the environment (what resources are available at the institution beyond your PhD advisor) and the number of PhDs produced. This is just segmenting in to two groups, not putting value on the quality, just describing differences between the groups. From their own description of the analysis:

While this approach is suitable for classification purposes, we do not believe the institution-level results should be used for institution-by-institution comparison and ranking.

Another interesting comparison (second highest coefficient for the per-capita productivity score):

• Median research expenditures per faculty
  • R1: $252k
  • R2: $53k

Now with that context, I think we get some insight to the answer to the questions.

... I didn't know about the stigma [PhDs from] regional institutions carry in the United States.

Why is this the case? Why is it that regional institutions are frowned upon in academic circles?

I wouldn't call it a stigma as much as PhDs from R2s were in a far less resourced environment, and their productivity quantity and quality could be lower than one from an R1. There are far fewer PhDs from R2s, and the groups they came from had 5x less funding and significantly less institutional support than their R1 counterparts. I'd go even further and say that there's a similar drop off from the "top 10" R1 institutions where most faculty are hired from and the rest of the R1s.

So there isn't so much a "stigma" against R2s as there is a "bias" towards "top 10" institutions. On one hand, the top graduates from there were the top-of-the-top and succeeded at the highest level in the best resource environment, so it's not unlikely that they would continue that trajectory. However, this leads to a situation where 80% of US faculty come from only 20% of the institutions, and 1/8 faculty came from one of 5 institutions. (EDIT: the original paper appeared in Nature, at this link.)

To me, a key benefit of regional institutions is more individualized attention due to smaller class sizes. This was the major reason I attended my regional college since I graduated from high school with a class of 8 people and it would've been too much of a culture shock to go to a school with 50k undergrad

These are two different issues.

• Class size (and classes) are irrelevant to a PhD. Classes themselves are largely irrelevant except in how they prepare you to produce scholarly work.
• Class size (and classes) are extremely relevant for an undergrad degree and is an advantage you gain at a regional school at the expense of the lack of opportunities (due to lack of funding and institutional support) for the "R1 research experience." But you can still get the "R1 experience" doing a summer REU. R2 undergrads can go on to be successful in an R1 PhD program.

I've heard reasons for regional colleges' bad reputation all across the board from high acceptance rates to suboptimal graduation rates, or to not being known to most graduate schools in the United States. Are all of those reasons true? Or, is there more to the story?

I think this is also conflating grad vs. undergrad. For undergrad, the top regional college graduates are usually pretty good in R1 PhD programs (especially if they did some summer program at an R1 school). The median student, however, can be unprepared for an R1 PhD for the reasons you cite. I have been on R1 PhD admissions committees and have had an outstanding student from a regional school in my R1 research group. An additional significant advantage regional students have are that they are often US citizens, which matters for some funding and fellowships.

For grad school, it's not that the schools have a bad reputation, but when you compare two graduating PhDs on paper (and hide the school name), there is very often a significant difference in quantity and quality of publications between an R1 and R2 graduate. There's an argument that they should be evaluated based on what they could achieve based upon the resources available to them, but institutions are typically risk-adverse. An open line is very important (and expensive, on the order of several million dollars), it's hard for departments to justify hiring a PhD from an R2 institution that did well with limited resources when another candidate from an R1 institution is ready to go now.

However, post-docs can help a lot. Doing a post-doc at an R1 after an R2 will give you that institutional experience.

Answer 4

I'm not sure which field you are in I'm sure that could factor in to perceived reputation as well. I am a PhD graduate in chemistry from an R1, but I did my undergrad in a regional college. I think your concerns with the perceived reputation is more so with graduate degrees than undergrad. In my undergrad most of my professors did their PhD at an R1, and being in a smaller regional college, I get to do research very early and I definitely felt a lot more prepared for grad school compared to some of my peers who might have gone to an R1 but didn't have as much research experience as I did.

However, for graduate degrees, the level of expectations and the competitiveness of your research become more apparent going from an R1 to an R2, the faculties are not subjected to the same level of competitions between them. For example, an assistant professor at an R1 institution, when they go up for tenure, they are being compared with people that are in the top of their field, and percentage of tenure awarded is relatively low, some professors don't survive their first 5 years. As you go to lower tiers, it is easier and easier to get tenure, and many professors are not expected to do high impact research like those at an R1, so the graduate students in their group would also likely not have been expected to produce high impact research. Therefore the perceived prestige of your graduate degree would not be as good as those in R1.

That being said, combining the two points, most of my peers in graduate school at an R1 did their undergrad at a regional college where they had years of undergraduate research experience with multiple publications, but the reason we get in to R1 is because we are already ahead when it comes to research. Most professors at R1s that take lots of graduate students are in their early to mid career where their tenure or reputation is dependent on their high impact work in the field, so the PhD students in their group will graduate with publications and accomplishments that are also at the top of the field.

Answer 5

Maybe someone should mention something inherent with "lower-ranking" colleges and that is the matter of research resources, especially laboratories if your field is science or engineering. Colleges not having certain instrumentation precludes them from having graduates proficient in those techniques, unlike graduates of better-endowed colleges.

Sure, any smart go-ahead student can catch up over a few months if given some mentoring by senior students/postdocs. And biased professors will often wax on sadly about "inexperience" and "lack of technical proficiencies" when they simply do not rate the student or their first college and are too cute to say so. But it is extra work if new techniques need to be mastered first.

As long as college ratings are based principally on quality of research output then the regard of regional colleges will be handicapped by their more limited laboratory budgets.

Exceptions will occasionally arise, e.g. when an inspiring professor cultures his own research group, wins funds from outside state/national education sources and makes a breakthrough that the R1/R2 groups failed to make. But even in that scenario, any additional enhancement of RCU status may be confined to the star RCU rather than seen as a consequence of RCUs' educational emphasis generally.

You mentioned that even if you got accepted to a good SLAC you wouldn't have been able to afford to go there. That's the other aspect of any human selection process: where a candidate's past record betokens "poverty", academics involved in grad student/postdoc/staff selection - some of whom may be socially insecure themselves and simply aping the manners and attitudes of their more socially well-heeled peers - may not want to be associated with them.

Answer 6

"To me, a key benefit of regional institutions is more individualized attention due to smaller class sizes."

That's the key here. R1 faculty expects their Ph.D students to be able to do research right away. The last thing they want is a needy Ph.D student.