In Illinois, a former president of NIU used to argue that directionals with “North” or “Northern” in their name were never prestigious, unlike those with “Southern” or “South.”
Not sure how east compares to west.
Some schools have changed their names due to changes in the nature of the school. Two schools chose their new names so that the initials would remain the same:
Claremont Men’s College became Claremont McKenna College CMC
Waterloo Lutheran University became Wilfred Laurier University WLU
A HS classmate who received a full ride to Skidmore was the frequent target of ribbings about his being a student at “Skid Row College” during our HS senior year and some years after.
Ironic considering one issue he encountered as a full-ride student was how most classmates couldn’t relate/understand his SES situation because they came mostly from upper/upper-middle class backgrounds and didn’t need to worry nearly as much about minding their personal finances as he did.
Bates College in Lewiston, Maine…I wonder if there is a Bates Motel there??
@LBowie Seriously! When I think “Sweet Briar,” the mental image is one of a finishing school for debutants. 
I just wonder whether they offer master’s degrees . . . . >:)
Bates aside, I always heard that college was undergrad only and university meant MA/MS and beyond. So U of Puget Sound, a LAC, became a university because of the MA in teaching and OT/PT schools.
When I told my daughter she should take a look at Lewis & Clark College, she laughed. Her attitude changed dramatically after a visit. But then she had to make sure and not confuse it with Lewis and Clark Community College.
@GnocchiB Hence why Princeton filed suit against TCNJ the year TCNJ’s name change was made. But I can’t blame TCNJ for wanting to change its name - colleges do not want to have bad areas in their names if they can avoid it. It can scare off applicants. That’s probably why William Paterson University doesn’t go by just Paterson University.
My LAC offers Masters in some Musical Performance/Education through their renowned conservatory. Several other LACs offer graduate degrees in a variety of fields including some seven sister ones like Smith.
And I thought that in addition to advanced degrees, universities had colleges or schools within them (Arts and Sciences, Engineering, Management,…) but I think there might be colleges with more than one school within too.
All this about the use of college or university may have some historical basis, but it’s never been at all something with a clear dividing line, and by now it’s become more of a marketing label to pick one or the other than anything else.
Dartmouth College is an unusual case. D is not a full-fledged research university with a complete range of graduate departments. Its focus remains on undergraduate teaching, not on preparing PhD students to be the next generation of academics. In many ways, D is like a very large LAC with unprecedented resources and associated professional schools. The retention of the title “college” is deliberate.
It would in some ways make more sense for USN&WR to rank D as the #1 LAC rather than among the research Us. But that would be unfair to the LACs that really are solely LACs. (Nothing pejorative intended.)
Anyway, modestly is more becoming than puffery. B-)
Among Ivy League schools, Princeton would appear to be the closest to approaching an undergraduate-focused, LAC-like environment.
^ Dartmouth is pretty undergrad-focused too.
^^ Would Dartmouth be ranked higher than Williams, Amherst or Swat, though (not to mention Pomona, Midd, Bowdoin, Wellesley)? It would be interesting to apply the LAC criteria to Dartmouth and see where they’d be ranked in the LAC ranking.
I’d be curious as to how you arrive at that conclusion, merc81. Both schools have an undergraduate focus, but P has far more graduate departments.
Good question, prezbucky.
I think one reason why they don’t is that D does offer earned(as opposed to honorary) PhDs in some fields…something which no LAC does that I know of.
Not very sure as SWA are very academically elite in their own rights.
If one went by admissions difficulty in my HS graduating class, Williams would have certainly edged out D as the GPA/SAT stats and proportion of students admitted showed W to be a much harder admit than D. In fact, the few W applicants I knew of who had D or Cornell on their application list used them as their safety schools in case they were rejected by W or schools of the HYPSMCC tier.
Dartmouth also offers non-LAC undergrad majors such as Business and Engineering, plus it has an MBA program and a medical school:
From Dartmouth’s website you can see its grad school offerings do not fit in any kind of LAC mold
Master’s Programs
◦Chemistry
◦Comparative Literature
◦Computer Science
◦Digital Musics
◦Engineering
◦Earth Sciences
◦Master of Arts in Liberal Studies
◦Master of Health Care Delivery Science
◦Physics and Astronomy
◦Quantitative Biomedical Sciences
Doctoral Programs
◦Biochemistry: Molecular and Cellular Biology Program
◦Biology: Molecular and Cellular Biology Program
◦Chemistry
◦Cognitive Neuroscience: Psychological and Brain Sciences
◦Computer Science
◦Earth Sciences
◦Ecology Evolution Ecosystems and Society (EEES)
◦Engineering
◦Experimental and Molecular Medicine (PEMM): Program includes Biomedical Physiology, Cancer Biology and Molecular Therapeutics, Cardiovascular Diseases, Molecular Pharmacology and Toxicology, and Neuroscience
◦Genetics: Molecular and Cellular Biology Program
◦Health Policy and Clinical Practice
◦Mathematics
◦Microbiology and Immunology: Molecular and Cellular Biology Program
◦Physics and Astronomy
◦Psychological and Brain Sciences
◦Quantitative Biomedical Sciences
Special Interdisciplinary Training Programs
◦Environmental Sciences
◦Master of Engineering Management (MEM)
◦Medical Physics
◦MD/MS Program in Biomedical Engineering
◦PhD Engineering Innovation Program
◦MD/PhD Program at Dartmouth
◦PhD/MBA Program
◦Polar Programs
FYI: Some LACs do offer engineering as a major in its own right. Swarthmore and Smith are 2 off the top of my head.
Per 2015-16 CDS for each school – number of undergrad and grad students and % of total students who are undergrad:
Brown: 6652 undergrad, 2806 grad – 70.33% undergrad
Dartmouth: 4307 undergrad, 2043 grad – 67.83% undergrad
Princeton: 5402 undergrad, 2736 grad – 66.38% undergrad
Cornell: 14315 undergrad, 7589 grad – 65.35% undergrad
Penn: 9726 undergrad, 11669 grad – 45.46% undergrad
Yale: 5532 undergrad, 6853 grad – 44.67% undergrad
Harvard: 6636 undergrad, 14192 grad – 31.86% undergrad (per 2014-2015 CDS)
Columbia: 8613 undergrad, 21691 grad/other – 28.42% undergrad
This does not tell us how much money (either in total dollars, per student, or as a % of each school’s expenses) how much each school spends on its undergrads, but it at least ranks them in terms of % of total student population who are undergrads.
A few others:
Stanford: 6999 undergrad, 9771 grad – 41.74% undergrad
MIT: 4527 undergrad, 6804 grad – 39.95% undergrad
UChicago: 5860 undergrad, 9866 grad – 37.26% undergrad