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Simmons College to morph into Simmons University this fall

The college announced the change today; says it's reorganizing around four new undergraduate colleges that will remain women only, along with its existing graduate programs that are already open to men.

The new colleges, which will include the Gwen Ifill College of Media, Arts, and Humanities are the result of a planning and "visioning" process that began in 2011.

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A better Library and Information Studies program is available just across the state border at University at Albany https://www.albany.edu/informationstudies/ist_about.php

Deficient Simmons programs in Library and Information Studies are too doctrinaire where the Case Method of study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_method would be more appropriate, more workable. Overpriced Simmons tuition haven't robust financial support programs, haven't robust scholarship programs for Library and Information Studies.

Northeastern University or University of Massachusetts at Boston would do well to offer Library and Information Studies programs, particularly emphasizing Massachusetts Public Libraries careers and advanced knowledge of technologies/software policy/practice.

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Oh Don, never change.

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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.

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In recent years, Lesley, Bentley, Salem State, Fitchburg State, Framingham State, and even the Mass. College of Pharmacy have restyled themselves as 'Universities'.

Boston College will have to be more creative if they want to adopt a new name.

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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...

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The state colleges did it for the exact same reason as your alma mater not to “make students feel like they aren’t second rate” as you put it. Decreased state funding means finding new sources of revenue like more foreign students paying full boat.

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I heard from a college administrator once that there there are several reasons schools change from "colleges" to "universities" without changing their organizational structure. One of the main one was that international students (and their full-tuition paying parents) tend to look more favorably at the word "university" than the word "college". "College" in many languages refers to smaller high schools or just "schools", while universities hold more prestige.

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Like BC, you'd think if you have "college" as an intrinsic part of your name, it would be hard to become a "university". And yet, MCPHS University (that's Masschusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences University) has done it.

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They could have just become Mass. University of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.

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I really doubt that MIT or Wentworth will change, either.

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I believe Wentworth changed from a college to university a few years ago.

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But the name has enough prestige (As does MIT, WIT, and Dartmouth) to keep their name.

Simmons isn't that well known to keep the name.

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I doubt that Worcester Polytechnic Institute or Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will be changing their names anytime soon, either.

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Now Swirly can cobble together all her former experiential experience into a degree at some point.

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Hah!

In Hebrew, the word for the Institute is "mossad."

Which also means institutions. "Behave yourself or you'll wind up in a mossad" is a pretty frequently heard threat for Israeli school children, the implication being that they are at risk of winding up in a mossad as in a reform school.

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

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but they didn't change their name.

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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

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Much the same at WPI, too...

A couple of decades ago (give or take), we had a new President who would, in speeches and other communications, frequently refer to "...what The University was doing..., ...how The University was doing..., or using "WPI" as much & "Institute" as little as possible - as if he was afraid we would be mistaken for a welding school or something.

I don't know what happened - whether word filtered back to him that the students & faculty were not insecure about our name/brand/reputation and he figured out that he should tone it down with the "University" nonsense, or people just stopped listening to him.

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"Is "college" a bad word now?"

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/Nqr4OSi.jpg)

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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.

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Gwen Ifill College of Media, Arts, and Humanities

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They didn't know she was panoramic.

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This is an important step. The visioning planners have decisioned that universitying is what should be futured.

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...people who "verb" a noun rather than using a perfectly good existing verb will be pilloried; the dungeons for people who say "gift" rather than "give". Hanging for anyone who uses "ideate".

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What's wrong with the plain old English language? It was good enough for Jesus, dammit!

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...it loses a lot in the translation.

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That's a big ask.

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...people who "verb" a noun rather than using a perfectly good existing verb will be pilloried;

Did you not just do that?

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Quotation marks will have to suffice until someone comes up with more specific irony marks.

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It's just is not helping.

"I trained downtown yesterday"

So, I either 'took a train' or took an EMT course or something yesterday.

Just too damn ambiguous.

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and a university? About $40,000 extra a year.

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All that means is how to increase tuition 101

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A college beccomes a university when they stop giving a damn about the undergraduates.

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