An institution is recruiting a promising young scholar for a faculty job. One problem: That dream candidate wants a faculty position for their partner. The partner hire is a recruitment imperative — and, studies show, a boon for retention and productivity.

How adept are R1 institutions at landing both halves of an academic couple? Two professors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — themselves partners — wanted to find out. Their new scorecard ranks the nation’s top research universities based on their policies and practices for partner hires. Here are a few key findings:

Public institutions were more likely than their private counterparts to hire partners for both faculty and nonfaculty positions (82 percent of public institutions and 41 percent of private ones were willing to create faculty jobs; for nonfaculty hiring, those percentages were 68 and 47 percent, respectively).

An Advance grant from the National Science Foundation is good news for academic couples. It makes sense, given the grant’s focus on promoting gender equity in STEM. Eighty percent of the R1 institutions that have been awarded “Institutional Transformation” or “Adaptation” Advance grants had a mechanism for hiring partners for faculty jobs, compared to 62 percent of those who had not.

There are regional differences. Universities in the Northeast were least likely to make any sort of partner-hire accommodations. The researchers say that could be because administrators there think the “relative density” of academic institutions in the region makes it easier for partners to find work at neighboring institutions.

For more, read our story from Megan Zahneis