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The Distinctives of Regional Public Universities

ByBlake Decker

A recent Wall Street Journal article’s title captured the concern of many in higher education in 2025: America’s College Towns Go From Boom to Bust (WSJ). Based on their national analysis of 748 public four-year colleges and universities, the authors found that “enrollment at the most prominent state universities increased 9% in 2023 compared to 2015,” while “enrollment fell 2%…at lesser-known regional state universities” (WSJ). The timing of the WSJ article coincided with the recent release of the 2025 Carnegie Classification system, which introduced a new set of frameworks that have revised how we talk about institutional characteristics and outcomes. Our previous blog posts (part 1 and part 2) provided overviews of the components of the new Carnegie system: Institutional Classification, Research Activities Designation, and Student Access and Earnings Classification.

One of the key elements to the Student Access and Earnings Classification (SAEC) measures was Carnegie’s utilization of a relatively new framework that directly relates to the WSJ findings mentioned above: Regional Public Universities (RPUs). Developed by the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges (ARRC), researchers sought to better understand RPUs, characterizing these universities as having a “crucial role in expanding educational opportunity throughout P-20 education and supporting regional wellbeing” (ARRC Executive Summary). Carnegie’s SAEC methodology recognized the importance of location for RPUs by regionalizing the data against which RPUs were compared on both the access and earnings metrics (SAEC Technical Manual). Because RPU status is a central tenet of the new Carnegie Classification methodology, this blog post will serve as the first of several that will unpack the features that make RPUs distinctive in the higher education landscape.

RPU versus non-rpu institutions: what are the differences?

In ARRC’s final report, they identified 474 institutions (out of 589, or 80.5%) nationally that their cluster analysis classified as being Regional Public Universities. In Texas, 26 of the 35 (74.3%) public universities in the national IPEDS data system were classified as RPUs. The map below shows these Texas RPUs, as hovering over each dot will provide campus-specific information reported in the RPU dataset, supplemented with 2024 data for enrollment, first-year persistence rates, and 6-year graduation rates from the THECB. As shown on the map, the Texas A&M University System had the highest number of RPUs of any public university system in Texas with 11 of 12 members (if you include soon-to-be member Texas A&M University-Victoria) included in the list of RPUs.

While ARRC’s analysis incorporated more than 125 variables for public 4-year institutions from the IPEDS database, we wanted to provide a small subset of variables to provide comparisons between RPU and non-RPU institutions at the national and state levels.

  • Overall Enrollment: The ARRCs data estimated that 47% of all bachelor’s degree-seeking students at 4-year public universities were enrolled at RPUs in the United States. In Texas, almost 44% of all bachelor’s degree-seeking students at public universities were enrolled at the 26 RPUs in fall 2024.
  • Enrollment Intensity: More than one-quarter (26%) of all students at RPUs in the United States were attending part-time (less than 12 semester credit hours (SCH) for undergraduates and less than 9 SCH for graduate students), as compared to only 14% of non-RPU students nationally. In Texas, 37% of students at Texas RPUs attended part-time, while less than 24% of students at non-RPU Texas public universities were part-time students.
  • Pell Grant: Across the 474 RPUs in the nation, 37% of RPU students, on average, were Pell grant recipients in the AARC data. At Texas RPUs, almost 52% of all students enrolled were Pell grant recipients, as compared to 35% of students enrolled at non-RPU public universities in Texas.
  • 6-Year Graduation Rates: Student outcomes is an area where RPUs and non-RPUs differ the most in the ARRC data. Across RPUs nationally, less than 50% (49.7%) of students who start as first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students completed a bachelor’s degree from that institution within 6 years of enrollment. That percentage increased to 70.3% for non-RPU institutions nationally. Using the most recent data from the THECB for public universities in Texas, the 6-year graduation rate in 2024 for RPUs was 46%, while the 6-year graduation rate at non-RPUs in Texas was 67.4%.
  • Average Net Price for Students Awarded Grant or Scholarship Aid: For students who received grant or scholarship aid in AY2023, the average net price for an academic year was $13,411 at RPUs across the United States. That average net price for RPUs was 23% lower (or $3,884 less) than the average net price of $17,294 for students awarded grants/scholarships at non-RPUs nationally. For RPUs in Texas, the average net price for students awarded grants/scholarships was $11,864 in 2023, which was $3,071 (or 21%) lower than the average net price of $14,935 for grant/scholarship awardees at non-RPUs in Texas.
  • Rural-Serving Institutions (RSI): The Rural-Serving Institution (RSI) designation is a new metric developed by ARRC to identify which colleges and universities “play vital roles in supporting educational opportunity, social development, and well-being of rural communities” (ARRC). ARRC research conducted a factor analysis that included both institutional data and location-centric data that resulted in each institution receiving an index score ranging from 0 to 4, with higher scores representing institutions that are more rural serving than others. The RSI score was just one variable in determining RPU status, so not all RPUs are rural-serving institutions, and not all RSI-designated institutions are RPUs. In the national data, almost half (49%) of all RPUs were also considered rural-serving institutions as compared to 28% of all non-RPUs also being identified as RSIs in the ARRC data. In Texas, over 42% of RPUs were also identified as RSIs, while only 11% of non-RPUs held the RSI designation across all public universities in Texas.

So What?

The methodology used in identifying and defining Regional Public Universities (RPUs), as well Carnegie’s use of RPU status in determining the Student Access and Earnings Metrics, makes the concept of RPUs intriguing from a higher education research perspective. In their cluster analysis, ARRC researchers used more than 125 publicly-available variables to help identify which institutions were most similar in terms of RPU status. The bullet points above represent a very small subset of those variables, but they serve to highlight that there are distinctives of RPUs that present challenges not found in similar magnitudes at non-RPU institutions. Over the course of the next few blog posts, we will dig more deeply into specific data domains to better understand how RPUs are distinct from non-RPUs and discuss the implications of those differences, starting with the topic of Rural-Serving Institutions (RSIs) briefly introduced above.