This has been one of my biggest pet peeves for decades!
This is the practice that really bugs me, because it takes advantage of families who don’t know any better:
Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with the programs they offer, but a lot of unwitting folks think these schools are a “great value” because they appear to be “so much cheaper than the competition,” when the schools really aren’t competitors at all when it comes to academic offerings.
For historical reasons Dartmouth will NEVER call itself a university, even though it long ago met the functional definition of one. Early in the 19th century the state of New Hampshire tried to stage a hostile takeover, and set up a bogus parallel administration called “Dartmouth University.” The resulting lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court with Dartmouth alum, Daniel Webster, arguing for Dartmouth College against Dartmouth University. Dartmouth College won the case and has thus remained Dartmouth College ever since.
^^ Personally, I find the (for lack of a better term) understatedness of that name much more endearing and compelling than all the little state colleges in PA that we’re now supposed to refer to as “_________ University,” with no reference whatsoever to their public missions in their names.
The Dartmouth case is quite famous and well known to law students.
There is a business school in RI that changed its name from Bryant College a few years back to Bryant University. AT the time this change was explained as the result of new partnerships in Asian countries, where the word ‘college’ is synonymous with what we call high schools. So the change was instituted to avoid confusion.
And my brother went to a Kiddie College when he was 4. No one confused it with the ‘real’ university in town.
In fact, that university had been a Normal School, then a State University, and is now a branch of the unified university system with about 20 locations of universities (many years ago the state merged the university system with the state college/university system). I don’t think anyone believes that the school needs to remain a ‘Normal School’ more than 100 years after it became much more than that. It still has many students majoring in education, that is still a big focus of the school, but it now also offers degrees in science and music and business at the bachelor and masters levels. The schools change.
I don’t have an issue with the schools using college or university in their title as long as they are not claiming to be accredited. No one is going to confuse MIT with ITT Tech.
^^ I think you may be highly underestimating the general ignorance/confusion of the average American.
Obviously, some people are beyond helping, but my issue is with the inability of the average potential consumer of higher ed to distinguish between the various choices out there in the marketplace. And, personally, I feel like too many schools intentionally contribute to that ignorance, hoping to benefit from the confusion.
I’m not going to lose sleep if an MIT or Caltech student gets his feelings hurt because someone doesn’t know the difference between their school and ITT Tech. It does bother me, however, that some unsuspecting kid, whose parents never attended college and have no idea about this stuff, confuses a mediocre proprietary school with some of the finest academic institutions in the world. Too many schools (both proprietary and nonprofit) benefit financially from that ignorance.
I’ve seen a wave of transformations from “colleges” to “universities” where I live in the Greater Philadelphia area over the last few decades. Have ALL these schools really changed all that much in terms of their academic offerings and research outputs?