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AAU Constituent Groups ... Membership in the association is by invitation. ... process used to identify institutions that may be invited into membership
AAU Membership Policy
AAU Membership Indicators
The AAU presidents and chancellors have adopted the following set of membership indicators to use in assessments of current and potential new members. All indicators will be tabulated as both actual values and normalized, per-faculty measures where feasible. In assessing non-U.S. institutions, comparable indicators appropriate to those institutions will be used. These indicators are divided into Phase I indicators, which will be used as the primary indicators of institutional breadth and quality in research and education, and Phase II indicators, which will be used to provide additional important calibrations of institutional research and education programs. Both the Phase I and Phase II indicators constitute the first stage of membership assessment. The second stage involves a more qualitative set of judgements about institutions and their trajectories.
Phase I Indicators
1) Competitively funded federal research support: The Membership Committee uses National Science Foundation (NSF) research expenditure data, excluding formula-allocated USDA research expenditures and American Recovery Reinvestment Act (ARRA) expenditures. Funding for the Agriculture Food and Research Initiative (AFRI), a competitively funded USDA research support program, is included in the Phase I research support indicator. 2) Membership in the National Academies (NAS, NAE, IOM): The National Academies’ membership database maintains the current institutional affiliation of its members. 3) Faculty awards, fellowships, and memberships: The Membership Committee gathers data on faculty awards, fellowships and memberships as an additional assessment of the distinction of an institution’s faculty. Additional appropriate awards, fellowships, and memberships will be added to this list as they are identified. 4) Citations: Thomson Reuters InCitesTM citations database provides an annually updated measure of both research volume and quality and will provide a valuable complement to the first four indicators listed above. Association of American Universities • 1200 New York Ave., NW Suite 550 • Washington DC 20005 • 202.408.7500
Phase II Indicators
1) USDA, state, and industrial research funding: Though these three sources of academic research support fund important, high-quality research, they are treated as Phase II indicators since they are generally not allocated through competitive, merit-review processes. Competitively funded USDA research programs, such as AFRI, that can be separately identified in reported data are included in Phase I data. 2) Doctoral education: The Committee uses number of Ph.D.s granted annually, using Department of Education IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) data. These data are treated as Phase II indicators to de-emphasize the quantitative dimensions of Ph.D. programs and avoid sending an unintended signal to institutions to increase Ph.D. output. 3) Number of postdoctoral appointees: The Committee uses NSF-compiled data from institutions on postdoctoral appointees, most of whom are in the health sciences, physical sciences, and engineering. Postdoctoral education is an increasingly important component of university research and education activities that the committee believes should be tracked in AAU membership indicators. However, because postdoctoral activity is highly correlated with university research and because self-reported postdoctoral data are less uniform than data on federally funded research, postdoctoral appointees are treated as a Phase II indicator. 4) Undergraduate education: The Committee assesses the institution’s undergraduate programs to determine that the institution is meeting its commitment to undergraduate education. Recognizing that differing institutional missions among research universities dictate different ways of providing undergraduate education, the committee will be flexible in this assessment. A number of measures have been suggested, including some that focus on input and others that look primarily at output variables. These are at this time imperfect, but may provide some guidance to the committee in making its judgments on this topic.