If you work at a branch campus where the main campus is a R1, is it classified as the same? I'm confused about where branch campuses stand in the whole scheme of things and how well they relate back to the mothership.
Yeah - I grew up in the same city as one of the Ohio State branch campuses. It was pretty much a community college.
There are differences between states that have a state university system (like the UCs - where each UC is it's own independent school - Berkley may be the "flagship" campus but the other UCs aren't satellites or branches of Berkley) versus branch campuses (like Ohio State, Ohio State Newark, Ohio State Marion, etc). I think the way you can spot the difference is if ALL campuses in a system specify the city (e.g. in texas UT-Austin, UT El Paso, UT Arlington, etc - yes people call the Austin campus UT but technically it is University of Texas at Austin and Austin is the flagship campus - same for UCs, University of Maryland System, etc). If you have a situation where there is one campus everyone knows about (Penn State) and then branches (Penn State Beaver, etc) you have a branch campus, which is NOT like being at a R1.
I would say they look at them more as community colleges as the default, but better to look at them each as individual places that are mostly independent from the main campus. There are likely some that are stronger than others. Look at department for things like teaching load, do they have an independent graduate program, how much are faculty publishing, etc. This would give you a good gauge of how each place is looked upon. I think when you do this, you'll find that most "branch" colleges are quite a lot different from the main campus.
In fairness you can also just check the rankings (at least us news' rankings) by searching for the school. *some* schools (Arizona state university) combine all of their campuses into one umbrella with faculty teaching at all of them, which might be treated better. However by and large a satellite / branch campus are at best a regional school and at times even unranked… (exceptions of course exist as stated earlier)
An example:
Indiana University is ranked 75th nationally but IU kokomo is 66th regional (midwest).