Why’d anyone attend Binghamton if they can’t have the program of study that they want. The focus on Binghamton compared to the other units of SUNY seems misguided. Does Binghamton spend that much more on PR. If you want to know why college tuition is sky rocketing, look at staffing of PR and the absurd salaries of the paper pushers in administration. The administrators are paid absurd amounts and there are an absurd number of them. They now need to hire administrators to administer the administration.
Buffalo’s business program is rated higher than Binghamton and Albany. Stony Brook and Binghamton are rated similarly overall with the other two centers pretty close-in most rating systems. They are all units of SUNY and none are flagships. There is no need for the SUNY system to be spending so much on PR. All it is doing is hyping each unit. What is the point of having units competing internally? Why is NY paying for that? They are doing nothing to increase the quality of the units nor to elevate them compared to the flagships elsewhere. Even with their absurd promo’s.
So my answer to your question is “no”. Harpur is now only a name given to one of 4 undergraduate units of the sUNY system’s university Centers. It is not “Harpur College”. There is really no “Harpur College”. Those are simply names given to designate the fact that you are referring to a generic undergraduate section of one of the SUNY universities. And in your case, it means that the student may not gain access to the desired curriculum, so what’s the point?