(05-29-2018 10:53 PM)GiveEmTheAxe Wrote: I'll add to the chorus of those saying that there's nothing wrong with the name UC Davis. The UC system has enough prestige to overcome whatever ideas people have about system schools with city names, hyphenated or non-hyphenated.
The CSU system, on the other hand, lacks uniformity in its naming formats and suffers a bit for it, I think. At least Cal Poly grabbed a cool name for itself.
If Stanford and the University of California hadn't lobbied to block the state's acquisition of what would become Caltech, we may have ended up with a much more confused university name landscape in California. It might have started a system to rival UC in a way that the CSU system has never been allowed to. Or maybe not. Maybe Caltech would just be a standalone public school.
The CSU system is too varied, and the charter too restrictive. Branding is a big issue, as the oldest schools want to keep the Prestige of being <City/county> State University. So SFSU, SJSU, SDSU, SSU, HSU are not going to change. Others like the State name and don't use the CSU in their (branding) names such as Stan State, Chico State, Sac State and Fresno State. Others proudly use it as Cal State (LA, Fullerton, East Bay, San Marcos) or CSU (Bakersfield, San Berandino, Channel Islands or CI, Monterey Bay, Northridge who go by CSUN). Then there is Long beach which can best be described as confused, so much so we don't know what to call the Beach.
Cal Poly markets itself as separate and flaunts it's semi-independence from the CSU charter, with it's own separate admission standards and program structure. Pomona piggybacks on Cal Poly.
The basic problem is everyone wants to disassociate from the CSU name because it implies regional admission and minimal standards, a commuter school, and no research. The gap to the UCs is enormous. Cal Poly and then SDSU form a partial bridge, but it only gets half way there.
What needs to happen is the State of California should recognize one size does not fit all, and the overflow in the highly urban State of resident ready students is far greater than the UCs can accommodate (which creates near Ivy League standards of admission, absurd for a publicly funded University system, which is supposed to be for the general public, not just the few Erudite class of a Veronica Roth novel). Splitting the system into say three systems of more similar schools makes more sense, each with their own charter.
The naming mess can probably never be cleaned up fully. The UC system has it's prestige because it is restricted to Veronica Roth's HS Erudite class, and unobtainable for mere 3.5 GPA students (who are not star athletes). Prestige by name comes when it is associated with exclusivity. Even if every Cal State went by Cal State, they would find they are associated with the regional schools such as East Bay and Bakersfield, and their lack of prestige sticks on them like glue. The only way to gain prestige is to separate some of the CSU schools from the rest, put them in a different administrative system with a different charter than allows them to separate and truly be Statewide schools and not regional. Prestige has to be earned. You can call them Stanford University (at Fresno or at Long Beach, etc) but they will not attain the prestige of the farm under the current system (although Stanford could make a killing licensing the name to somebody in Sacramento stupid enough to think branding was the root issue).
Charter, not brand is the issue.