Ph.D.-granting institutions, experimentalists should be encouraged to pursue collaboration with faculty at NPhD schools when there is an intellectual basis for it. Federal agencies can promote such collaboration in several ways, including encouraging and simplifying grant subcontracting. By exploiting the unique features of ECSE, greater research diversity and higher-quality education can be achieved.

As noted above, research has only recently become a goal of NPhD schools, and the research tradition may not be strongly established. Thus, when evaluating a faculty member for promotion, senior faculty and administrators at NPhD schools, lacking decades of experience in assessing research and applying newly established policies, may be even more inclined to rely on raw "paper counts" than their peers at Ph.D.-granting institutions. This, of course, greatly jeopardizes ECSE faculty, who may have a modest publication list. Guidelines described elsewhere in this report should be applied when assessing ECSE faculty.

Realism must be applied in evaluating the accomplishments of junior ECSE faculty for tenure at NPhD schools: expectations must be in accord with circumstances. As already discussed, time is the most critical component of a junior faculty member's career. It must be possible to begin research quickly, there must be time to conduct the experimental work, and there will be a delay in the time between the artifact's or experiment's completion and the time the impact of the work is perceived. Resources—equipment, Internet connections, software, and so on—as well as students are critical to success. When assessing the faculty member's record and when requesting letters of evaluation, the constraints and circumstances that affected the faculty member's probationary period must be made explicit.