All 187 R1 Universities by State

Every state and the District of Columbia is a tile below, with its R1 count. Click a tile to filter the explorer to that state. A grid is used instead of a map on purpose: on a map, Rhode Island's two R1 universities are a couple of pixels and Wyoming's single one is the size of a fist, which tells you nothing useful about where the research universities actually are.

Two of the four attribute badges are official designations with a legal or federal definition. Two are conventions that people quote as if they were official. Knowing which is which stops you from over-reading a row.

The badge that surprises people most is land-grant, because it is not a public-only club. Cornell University is New York's land-grant institution and MIT is Massachusetts', both private. If you are looking for a state's public research campus, use the land-grant badge as one clue, then check the institution's programs; the badge does not guarantee a flagship label or broad undergraduate offerings.

AAU membership is the badge most often mistaken for a quality score. All 69 US AAU members are R1, but 118 R1 universities are not, and that group includes Northeastern, Georgia State and the University of Central Florida, each of which clears the R1 research threshold without a seat at the association. Absence of the AAU badge does not by itself tell you about a department; it means the school is not an AAU member.

Twelve states and the District of Columbia hold five or more. Every other state holds four or fewer.

The count measures how many big universities a state built, not how good any of them is. Washington DC has five R1 institutions and no state university system at all: American, Catholic, Georgetown, George Washington and Howard are all private. Minnesota has exactly one, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and nobody argues it is one fifth as strong as Missouri's five. A high count mostly tells you that a state has several separate doctoral campuses rather than one consolidated one.

The split within a state matters more to you than the total. Virginia's six R1 universities are all public, so an in-state student there has six chances at a resident tuition rate. Massachusetts has eleven, but eight are private, so an in-state student really has three public options: UMass Amherst, UMass Boston and UMass Lowell. Run both states through the college cost comparison calculator before you decide which list looks better.

Then you are in Alaska or South Dakota, and the filter is not broken. Those are the only two states with zero R1 institutions in the 2025 designations. Nine more states hold exactly one: Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Minnesota, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming.

An R2 campus meets at least $5 million in annual research spending and 20 research doctorates a year. That is roughly three-tenths of the R1 doctorate threshold and one-tenth of its spending threshold, but an R2 campus can still support research opportunities, including undergraduate lab work at some institutions. For most undergraduate purposes the difference between the R1 and R2 line is smaller than the difference between two departments inside the same R1 campus.

Three moves that beat moving out of state at full price

1. Check your regional tuition-exchange programme first. As of September 2026, Alaska and South Dakota are WICHE-region states, so their residents may be eligible for the Western Undergraduate Exchange: more than 170 participating public colleges and universities agree to charge qualifying students from the WICHE region no more than 150 percent of resident tuition. Each school sets its own eligibility rules, and some cap awards. In participating SREB states, the Academic Common Market can provide in-state rates for approved out-of-state programmes that public institutions in the home state do not offer. Both programs use state-by-state and school or program eligibility lists, so open your own state's page rather than a summary.
2. Price the out-of-state R1 before you fall for it. Public universities generally publish resident and nonresident rates. WUE reduces the nonresident rate, while the Academic Common Market can provide the in-state rate for an eligible program. WUE's standard cap is 150 percent of resident tuition, though some schools charge less. Pull the published resident and nonresident rates for each school off its own bursar page, run both through its net price calculator, and decide how many colleges to apply to once you know how many you could actually pay for.
3. Look at the department, not the designation. A geology department at an R2 in a state with active geology may fund more undergraduate field work than a small department at an R1. Designations are institution-wide averages; your experience is departmental.

135 of the 187 are public and 52 are private nonprofit, so about 72 percent of the list is public. No for-profit institution holds the designation.

The public or private line is one billing distinction, but your home state, school, program and regional-exchange eligibility can also determine whether you pay a resident, reduced nonresident or full nonresident rate. Two R1 universities on opposite sides of the same city can quote the same student wildly different prices, and neither the R1 designation nor the AAU badge has anything to do with which is which.

Where the private side matters is aid policy. A private R1 with a large endowment may meet full demonstrated need and end up cheaper than an out-of-state public R1 that meets half of it. That is a per-school question, answered by each school's net price calculator, not by its designation. Filter this list to your state and the Public chip, then check every remaining name against the private R1s that publish need-blind or full-need policies.

42 institutions hold R1 for the first time. The reason is a change of method, not a sudden change in the schools. Until 2025 the classification ranked institutions on a composite index and cut the top group at a floating line, so a university could lose R1 by standing still while others moved. From 2025 the rule is a fixed threshold: at least $50 million of annual research spending and at least 70 research doctorates awarded a year. Meet both and you are R1, however many others also do.

That change opened R1 to institutions the old index kept out: medical-only campuses such as Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Weill Cornell Medicine, and mid-size public campuses such as San Diego State, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the University of Rhode Island. Howard University became the first HBCU to hold the designation.

Show the 42 schools new in 2025

The designation is an institution-level average. Three checks turn a name on this page into a defensible entry on your college list, and each takes about five minutes on the school's own website.

1. Does your major have a doctoral programme on this campus? R1 counts research doctorates across the whole institution. A university can clear 70 a year on biomedical science while your intended major stops at a master's degree, which means no PhD students in the lab, no doctoral seminars and far fewer funded research assistantships. Search the department's own site for "PhD" or "doctoral programs", not the university's admissions page.
2. Is there an undergraduate research office, and does it fund first- and second-years? Check the institution's site for a named funded programme with an application deadline and a stipend figure, and see whether it is open below junior year. If the only route in is "email a professor", the research advantage is theoretical.
3. What is the actual size of your first-year classes? As of September 2026, many US colleges publish a Common Data Set, but publication is not universal. When one is available, Section I-3 breaks undergraduate class sections into size bands. A campus where more than half of the sections seat over 50 students will feel very different from one where they seat under 30, and this number is not correlated with R1 status.

Once a name passes all three, put it into the college list builder with a reach, target or likely label. If you are still choosing between fields rather than between campuses, the college major quiz is the better first step, and what the R1 classification actually measures explains why the threshold rewards spending and doctorates rather than teaching.

Every row comes from the institution file published by the Carnegie Classifications, retrieved on 8 September 2026. Names, states, control codes and HBCU flags are reproduced as Carnegie carries them. The land-grant flags follow Carnegie's field except for the Penn State correction described below. AAU membership was matched by hand against the association's own member page. Nothing here is scraped from a secondary article, and nothing is ranked.

One row per institution as Carnegie lists it

Carnegie treats each degree-granting institution separately, which is why a multi-campus system can produce several rows. The University of California contributes ten rows, including UC San Francisco, which enrols no undergraduates at all. The University of Texas system contributes eight, three of them health science centres. Read a state's count as a count of separately accredited institutions, not campuses you can apply to as a high school senior: a medical-only R1 has no undergraduate admissions office.

Why the "new in 2025" count is 42 and not 41 or 43

The 2021 Carnegie file lists 146 institutions as R1. Comparing that file's identifiers with the 2025 file gives 43 R1 institutions that were not there before, but one of them is Penn State, which appears in the 2021 file only as a single system-wide record and in the 2025 file as the main campus. Penn State did not gain R1; its record changed shape. Excluding it gives 42 genuinely new institutions, plus 145 that carried over, which is the full 187. The single institution that left is the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Where this page departs from the raw file

The 2025 file flags 57 R1 rows as land-grant. This page shows 58. The missing one is Penn State again: its land-grant flag sat on the system-wide record that the 2025 file no longer carries, so the main-campus row inherited nothing. Penn State is Pennsylvania's 1862 land-grant institution, so the badge is shown. That is the only value on this page changed from the source file, and this paragraph is the reason.

Why there is no ranking

R1 is a threshold, not a league table. Two institutions on opposite ends of the research-spending range hold the same designation, and the classification publishes no order within the group. Sorting this list by anything other than name or state would invent a hierarchy the source does not contain. If you want to understand how the ranking publishers build theirs, and why their orders disagree with each other, start with how college rankings are actually calculated. Before a school goes on your list at all, it is worth taking two minutes to check that it is accredited.