Extension Economists: Valued in Mission, Penalized in Practice

As the public engagement arm of the land‐grant mission, we argue that Extension faculty in US agricultural economics departments face an identity crossroads as they struggle for institutional support. Specifically, we argue that Extension economists function as boundary‐spanning professionals within academic structures that often devalue applied engagement. Drawing on a 2025 survey of 125 members of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, this study examines how Extension is defined, practiced, and valued across career stages. Responses indicate broad conceptual agreement that Extension serves as a bridge between research and application, emphasizing stakeholder engagement, decision support, and public communication. However, faculty and graduate students differ in how they frame Extension's institutional role. Graduate students describe it as adaptable and stakeholder‐driven, while faculty anchor it in structured, metric‐based frameworks tied to the Cooperative Extension System. Quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrate that Extension appointments are perceived as less prestigious than research or research‐teaching roles, exposing persistent status penalties and institutional misalignment in tenure and promotion evaluation. We conclude that current university recognition systems incentivize faculty investments away from Extension and thus require structural changes to advance Extension's part of the tripartite land‐grant mission, particularly in how Extension outputs are evaluated for tenure and promotion.