Simmons College to morph into Simmons University this fall

Oh Don, never change.

Cool, but not everyone can up and move for a graduate program. Having one in Boston is important.

Also, that has nothing to do with the restructuring.

The state schools were a system-wide thing. If I remember correctly, part of it was to up the prestige and make students feel like the state colleges weren't second-rate to UMass.

One of the big reasons why Simmons is making this move (I'm an alum) is to recruit international students. I worked at a summer camp one summer during undergrad (read: many British/international staff members), and spent a great deal of time trying to convince them that the college/university distinction wasn't really important in the US. They couldn't seem to get it out of their heads anything called "College" at the end was not, in fact, a second-rate institution for people who couldn't get into "uni" the first time...

Where have you been these last decades? Colleges have been labeling themselves universities as a marketing strategy for that long.

Don't forget that WGU is located in Cambridge [even though most of it and its activities are located in Boston]

Why because the College and the Yahhhd are in Cambridge and the plain old undergraduates are actually graduates of the College, the rest are graduates of the Law, Medical or Business Schools

Meanwhile just down the street the "University polarized around science"*1 is just the Institute to its graduates

1 Dubbed such by no less than the legendary Gordon Stanley Brown..

"chairman of the MIT faculty from 1951 to 1952...In 1952, chairman of the electrical engineering department... from 1959 to 1968 dean of the school of engineering.... In 1973, Brown received the distinction of Institute Professor, MIT's highest academic honor.. and in 1985, building 39 on MIT's campus...home of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories was named the Gordon Stanley Brown Building.

from Wki article on Brown

To be a university in MA, the institution has to meet certain requirements. Lesley changed to Lesley University while I was in grad school there, and the last requirement they met was having at least two different PhD programs, which then allowed them to be a university.

A "college" typically implies a small, undergraduate-only, on-campus only, small student-body school. Classes are small and are all taught by faculty, because there aren't graduate programs. The schools that are committed to this type of education actively distinguish themselves from universities (or in MA or other states that regulate the term, schools that might practically be universities but not able to use the term). They talk about how it's a different type of education, and students may find one or the other to be a better fit.