Good people, but systemically flawed - Research Analyst Urban Institute Employee Review

Urban claims to be an independent research organization, but nearly all research is determined by funders. Funders don't influence findings, but they do determine what kind of research we do. If you have an original research idea, you have to find a funder to pay for it, which is very difficult. Otherwise, you submit proposals to in response to funders looking to contract researchers to study very specific topics in very specific ways. Generally, most project are the latter. Urban also has a history of working with questionable funders, including major banks and venture capitalists. Turnover is incredibly high-- everyone good leaves within a year or two. Black staff in particular tend to have short tenures. Leadership is almost entirely white, as is senior staff. Most of the institute's diversity comes from its junior staff, who are overworked and underpaid. Members of minority groups are often treated as "sounding boards" by clueless senior researchers and relied on to speak for entire populations. Urban also claims to be committed to racial equity, but that commitment feels superficial; an afterthought rather than a principle. Staff complaints, about issues or race or otherwise, aren't listened to by management; the same issues come up again and again with no resolution. DEI efforts are all talk and no action. Junior staff generally are treated as interchangeable, and do very little actual research. Very few opportunities for growth. The bulk of my job was to download and clean data for more senior folks to analyze. I also formatted things, compiled documents, took notes, acted as pseudo-project manager in trying to organize my very disorganized team and wrote the occasional draft. I was rarely allowed to assist with anything more advanced. Seems to be little respect for researchers who don't have a PhD. It's sort of expected that junior staff leave after a few years to go get their PhD; interestingly, almost no one who leaves to go to grad school comes back afterwards. Urban is chronically understaffed. Business model is funder-based, so management has to guess at how much money we'll bring in in a given year. This creates an incentive to have fewer staff than we have coverage for to reduce the risk of having staff to pay with no funds to do it with. However, every year Urban reports higher and higher funding levels, but hiring levels remain the same. This business model also causes more senior research to constantly push work down the pipeline to more junior staff who have cheaper rates-- senior staff's time is more respected because it's costly. Junior staff, though, get assigned mass numbers of hours, and often do the bulk of the work. It's also on each individual person to ensure they have enough projects to cover their time, and projects with tight budgets often caution against charging time while still expecting things to get done. I was told I'd be on 3-6 projects at the time; it ended up being more like 8-10. Very difficult to focus on any one subject area as a junior researcher as you're spread incredibly thin over many projects with a wide variety of topics. Some opportunities are available for junior staff to seek funding for their own work, but most don't have time to properly pursue them. The only somewhat-original work junior staff can do is write blogs, and even those have to be tied to some project. Urban seems to have very little respect for staff. HR is notoriously tight-lipped and the pay structure is very complicated and pay bands for each position are quite wide-- some people are paid much more and it's not clear why. Promotions are also done oddly-- you have to write up a "promotion packet" and submit it to HR for people who've never met you to determine if you're ready. Expectations for promotion are inconsistent; junior staff who have done similar work may be granted or denied the chance to apply for promotion based only supervisor opinion. There aren't clear standards for supervisors to use to determine promotion readiness. Almost all the good people I've met at Urban have either left or are trying to leave. If you're a junior researcher looking to gain experience and do policy research that has real, tangible impact, look elsewhere. To be fair, my impression is that most major DC think tanks have similar issues; Urban isn't unique in the way it treats staff. That doesn't change the fact that they could be doing a lot better, though.