Hate to break it to you, but Alabama is an R1 as well. As is every other school in the SEC.

I'm not sure R1 status means what you think it means. It means a lot if you're a PhD and want to go to a university where your job will be more research focused and less teaching focused. Generally, at R1s, tenure-line faculty only teaches two classes a semester because you're supposed to be churning out publications. Basically, at an R1, your job is to do research and teach a bit on the side. While teaching is still important, no one gets tenured for being a great teacher. You can be a mediocre teacher with a good publication record and make tenure, but an award winning teacher with no pubs almost never will.

PhDs tend to pay a lot of attention to the Carnegie designations because it tells us up front what is going to be expected of us if a school is an R1. Grad students should pay attention to them because it says a lot about how much hands on experience they will be getting in conducting research. Undergrads - well, that's different.

There are many schools that aren't R1s because they specifically focus on teaching by choice and thus will never be an R1. Some PhDs go to these schools for a myriad of reasons ranging from less publication stress to sincerely being more interested in teaching than research. They also generally teach three or four classes a semester.

It can be a trade off. While R1s tend to have more big time scholars in their various fields, at teaching-focused institutions, undergraduates tend to have more classes taught by actual tenure-line PhDs rather than adjuncts and grad students. At R1s, you often don't get to see that fancy faculty until you're a grad student. A lot of you may remember this experience; now you know why.

For an example of this in practice, Southern Miss has made it to R1 status as of recent, but it simply isn't as academically rigorous at the undergraduate level as some smaller colleges like a Trinity in San Antonio or a Millsaps in Jackson.

This post was edited on 9/6/19 at 10:41 am