Association of American Universities (AAU) Membership

Importance of AAU Membership

Membership in the AAU, a prestigious organization that includes the nation’s top research universities, provides KU with greater opportunities to receive federal funding for research that improves public health, addresses national challenges, and contributes to the nation’s economic strength.

AAU

KU’s mission is to, “Educate leaders, build healthy communities, and make discoveries that change the world.” In support of this mission, KU is committed to conducting broad and impactful research that addresses key challenges faced by our community, the state, the nation and the world. KU is a member of the AAU, which is a prestigious organization of the nation’s top research universities with leading research programs. As a member, we are recognized as one of the top research programs in the country, leading to federal funding for research that improves public health, addresses national challenges, and contributes to our nation’s economic strength. The AAU also lobbies in Washington DC for research and higher education funding and for policy and regulatory issues affecting research universities.

AAU membership is by invitation only, and the association ranks its members using a public set of criteria. These indicators, or metrics, are used by the AAU Membership Committee to evaluate current and potential members and are organized into Phase I and Phase II indicators. Phase I indicators receive priority consideration when determining membership and are quantitative. Most of the Phase II indicators are quantitative, but a few are more qualitative. All quantitative indicators are considered in their raw and normalized forms. The normalization factor (i.e. denominator) is tenure/tenure-track (T/TT) faculty counts. Normalization is performed to account for the wide range of research institution size amongst the membership.

The AAU membership indicators are listed below. Many of these indicators are included as outcome metrics for Jayhawks Rising. Units should consider the applicability of these indicators to their units and develop unit-level strategies to improve the metrics. As with any metric, there are multiple ways of improving performance. For example, given AAU metrics are normalized on T/TT faculty counts, indicators may be improved by either increasing the numerator (such as the total amount of federal R&D expenditures) or by reducing the denominator (such as reducing T/TT faculty counts through non-replacement of open lines when student enrollment is low in a unit). There is some indication that the Phase I indicators are listed in order of importance for membership consideration.

  1. Competitively funded federal research support: The Membership Committee uses National Science Foundation (NSF) research expenditure data, excluding formula-allocated USDA research 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. 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. Beginning in 2023, memberships in the national academies will be included in this indicator.

  3. 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.

  4. Books: The Membership Committee gathers data on book publications to represent scholarship at AAU institutions – especially in the fields of arts, humanities, and social sciences.

See the AAU membership policy.

  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 PhDs 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 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.

See the AAU membership policy.

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