MBB: Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association

[KnightSlappy]

https://calvin.edu/offices-services/enrollment-research/reports/

A quick skim leads me to believe that Calvin hosts 37 Canadian students, a number that's apparently fallen in recent years. (I seem to remember Ontario being in the top 5 home "states" at one point in the fairly recent past.)

[pointlem]

https://calvin.edu/offices-services/enrollment-research/reports/

A quick skim leads me to believe that Calvin hosts 37 Canadian students, a number that's apparently fallen in recent years. (I seem to remember Ontario being in the top 5 home "states" at one point in the fairly recent past.)

Thanks for the link, KnightSlappy.  I must say I'm surprised and impressed by Calvin's international student population (which doesn't suggest that their name has been a huge problem, though I understand the rationale) . . . and I'm wondering how they achieve this:

"The top five non-North American countries represented by our International students based on their citizenship are South Korea (169 students), Ghana (56 students), China (39 students), India (27 students), Nigeria (18 students), Honduras (12 students), Indonesia and Ethiopia (9 students each)."

[calvinite]

The number of Canadian students at Calvin has been steadily and significantly declining over the past 10 years. In 2016, there were only 51 Canadian students enrolled at Calvin. At the same time, the number of international students (overall) has been increasing. International students, in fact, is the one bright spot in Calvin's enrollment statistics, and yes, the word 'University' makes a huge difference especially in Asian countries such as South Korea which sends a significant number of students to Calvin College. South Korea sent 168 students to Calvin in 2016, and that is double what it sent in 2011.

[HopeConvert]

Or Dartmouth. Or Williams. Or Pomona. Or Amherst. Somehow I think they get by.

Does Calvin have the international name recognition built up over centuries that Dartmouth, Williams, and Amherst have? No, it doesn't. Apples and oranges.

I was responding to your claim that the word "college" necessarily causes confusion for foreign students and their institutions. I see you're now amending that claim based on your perception of "prestige."

Well, the 12% includes Canadians

Well, if you really want to get into the weeds on this that badly, I'm willing to modify the percentage ... if you're willing to dig out the data as to what percentage of the Calvin student body consists of Canadians. 

There was a very large contingent of Canadian students when I attended Calvin. I have no idea what the numbers are now.

, but one might well ask whether high percentages of foreign students is a legitimate desideratum.

Sure, one might well ask. And one might well answer, "Yes, it is."

One might answer thusly. Then again, one might not.

It really should be about a school serving its mission and its tradition the best it can.

... which could legitimately mean changing the name. With regard to tradition, I can't speak as to how long Calvin has had such a high proportion of international students, so I'm agnostic on that subject. But enrolling a high percentage of international students could very well be an aspect of Calvin "serving its mission", so I'm not going to gainsay Calvin on that score.

But Calvin is too busy being "innovative" to be bothered with such questions.[/b]

Really? Do you know for a fact that these questions were never taken under consideration by the people who run Calvin? Or is this a matter of you disagreeing with the decision, and then coming to the independent conclusion that Calvin didn't think it through because the school's braintrust doesn't agree with you?

Read the press release. I have no idea how much thought the so-called braintrust put into this. Their justification, however, is that it is a self-justifying innovation. The press release makes no argument as to how this fits into Calvin's mission and tradition (a concept I think you misconstrue). I find the press release to be tiresome corporate-speak. I'm sure my position on this as a graduate is of little interest to the school. And my withholding of contributions probably won't register, but they won't get another dime from me. Any reasonable review of Calvin's spending habits yields the conclusion they spend money foolishly. And in my lifetime, they have gone from a very interesting and well-regarded liberal arts college to a lightly regarded university that looks more and more like hundreds of other used-to-be-distinct colleges. I have no reason to believe that the "braintrust" understands that. This same braintrust has addressed the college's fiscal issues and declining enrollment by drastically increasing the size of the administration. So, yeah, I question their judgment.

Yeah, well, you can have grad programs and not be a university (see Dartmouth, above).

The terminology isn't used in a standardized manner by American institutions of higher learning, as you (and probably all of us who read this room) well know, because there is neither the will nor the capacity for accrediting bodies to standardize and enforce the nomenclature, or for the government on any level to step in and grant accrediting bodies such power. By strict definition, using the existence of grad programs as the marker, Wheaton College is a university and Illinois Wesleyan University is a college. So that's not the question. The issue is whether or not Calvin can plausibly call itself a university according to the traditional model, not whether or not it has the right to do so.

I never argued it wasn't plausible. I think it's not prudent. I'd like to know, for example, how much this costs. My own belief is that this name change is a further indication that Calvin is getting away from what once made it a really interesting place. It's becoming less interesting by the year.

But one might well ask whether the mission and tradition of the college, as well as its fiscal health, is well served by such expansions.

I don't know how long Calvin has had graduate programs. I doubt that they've been around for very many years (I know that the master's in accounting program was added just this school year), so it's likely that this isn't an aspect of the school that readily lends itself to tradtion. Yet tradition can be a shaky foundation upon which to build such an argument, since growth and expansion typically defy tradition in at least some respects. Even for a school that isn't growing, change to some degree is a necessary part of survival, especially since American higher education is market-driven and the students of this generation have a very different set of expectations and motivations regarding the college experience than do preceding generations. Indeed, whether for good or for ill, one of the salient facts of the modern paradigm in higher education is that schools are more sensitive to the perceived needs and desires of potential students than they used to be.

In concert with the needs of the school, that may override tradition. For example, to use a subject near and dear to the hearts of Calvinites, their school has never established a football program, in spite of the fact that the school conducted detailed studies of the pros and cons of adding football, first in 1967, then again in 1987, and yet again earlier in this decade. Each time, Calvin ultimately decided not to add the sport. Yet a number of D3 schools have abandoned their no-football traditions in recent years by adopting the sport in order to attract more males to campus (even non-football-playing males are more likely to choose a school that offers football than one that doesn't, all other factors being equal) and to increase tuition revenue.

As for mission and/or fiscal health, I am again agnostic as to how well graduate programs suit the school's mission and its budgetary bottom line, and it would take someone more attuned to Calvin's institutional pulse to answer that for me. But, again, I can speak to what I know about this through the lens of my alma mater; the old saying about North Park, especially when the subject of endowment came up, was that it didn't turn out captains of industry; instead, it turned out "teachers, preachers, and nurses". As time went on, it became internally apparent (i.e., via the education and nursing faculties) that graduate-level programs in those fields would: a) improve the school's overall reputation in them; b) build upon current faculty strengths; and c) make the school more attractive even to prospective undergraduates thinking of majoring in education or nursing, to say nothing of potential grad students. In other words, expanding into graduate education served both the tradition and mission of NPU with regard to the education and nursing fields. That may be the case with Calvin, too; again, I don't know Calvin well enough to say, although this article in the campus newspaper quotes two respected Calvin voices, Nicholas Wolterstorff and Joel Carpenter, as answering in the affirmative.

I respectfully disagree with both of them. As the school eviscerates its traditional strengths (history, religion, philosophy, languages, literature) it invests in the stuff students can get at a hundred other places. Everyone knows that the school has fiscal and enrollment problems. Does anyone honestly believe the name change is the solution?

My eye roll wasn't that I don't believe the statement to be true, but that it's a rather ridiculous reason to change your name. The statement could literally be rephrased to, "A portion of our students don't understand what a college is." It's patronizing and superficial.

It's none of those things. You're not perceiving the intended meaning of the sentence, although to be fair I don't think it was written very clearly. In that sentence:

The college also has a large international student population for whom "university" is more visible and better understood than "college."

... the implied subject, the people who better understand "university" than "college", are the people in the home countries of the international students, not the international students themselves. It's rather absurd to consider the international students as the subjects of that sentence, because, as Calvin students, they know exactly what sort of an institution it is that they are spending a considerable amount of money to attend. But they need it to be better understood by the people back home with whom they're going to interact for the rest of their lives.

I honestly wonder if there are decision makers at calvin who believe they are losing prospective students to Cornerstone, not because of cost of tuition, athletic scholarships, or that they genuinely like the newer buildings, neighborhood, and campus better, but solely because they are a "university" and not a "college".

That's a fair question. I'd only advise people not to leap to conclusions based upon speculation without facts. Again, I'd like to see Calvinites address this, since they're more in the know than either you or I vis-a-vis Calvin versus Cornerstone.

If I were a President of an elite liberal arts college, I may be inclined to keep the institution as a college in regards to branding because I think this could become more valuable over the long haul.

I think that that's an entirely legitimate inclination. I'm simply arguing that, contra HopeConvert, it's certainly possible to take that retain-the-brand inclination into due consideration and yet eventually come to a decision that moves in the other direction.

As many institutions look to compete in the market place through innovative, disruptive, boot camp-style blah, blah, blah approaches, I do think there is a tremendous opportunity for institutions to market the traditional college experience.

Marketing's another matter, though, and I'm not sure that it really enters into this. Name change or not, even with its expansion into graduate education Calvin at its core will continue to primarily be an undergraduate liberal-arts college. And I'm sure that the school will continue to market itself to prospective students in much the same manner as before, focusing upon the traditional college experience (i.e., residential undergraduate education aimed at 18-to-21-year-olds).

Calvin ranks 5th overall in regards to international students with 476, so certainly a significant percentage of those are Canadians.

"Certainly"? Again, how signficant? What are the numbers? I think it makes sense to examine the Calvin hockey roster first for evidence of a Canadian student population of any size. And yet there's only four sons of the maple leaf there amid a roster of 26.

That is a good number and I would be surprised if the administration plans to increase that percentage, though certainly the average degree-seeking international student is paying more than the average American student which, for what it is worth, is good for the basketball team.

In regards to the specific comment about international students, it can be extremely difficult to know from a press release to know how much that particular point matters, so I would not read too much in to it unless I knew more of the situation.

I think that that's a good point. Again, I stress that I'm only going by what I know from my own alma mater's perspective. For North Park, which had had a long-standing tradition of enrolling international students (particularly from Sweden, Norway, and South Korea), it mattered a great deal. In fact, feedback from both international alumni and then-current international students played a pivotal role in driving the name change back in '96.

[Gregory Sager]

I was responding to your claim that the word "college" necessarily causes confusion for foreign students and their institutions. I see you're now amending that claim based on your perception of "prestige."

I claimed no such thing. And the amending is being done at your end. The word "necessarily" does not appear in my initial post. I said that this was the cultural perception of the word "college" in Europe and East Asia, which it is, and that it thus constitutes a general problem -- enough of a problem for schools that aren't Dartmouth or Williams to give this some thought if they seek to enroll international students in any significant numbers from those places. But there are no absolutes involved, because the sum total of awareness within one country of the cultures and institutions of another country doesn't lend itself to absolute statements.

There was a very large contingent of Canadian students when I attended Calvin. I have no idea what the numbers are now.

KnightSlappy provided the numbers in his post here this afternoon.

One might answer thusly. Then again, one might not.

And Calvin did.

Read the press release. I have no idea how much thought the so-called braintrust put into this.

I read it. I'm not sure how carefully you read it, however, because your second sentence is addressed right there in the press release's second paragraph:

The board's decision follows the unanimous endorsement of the college's faculty senate in late April, marking the culmination of more than nine months of collaborative strategic work taken on by the Calvin community.

Nine months is a long time to study something. And, from what I know of college faculties, they tend to be better known for their contentiousness than for their uniformity, so the Calvin faculty senate's unanimity on this makes for a pretty ringing endorsement.

Again, it seems to me that you're drawing the conclusion that Calvin's leadership showed a lack of sincerity and effort in this decision based upon the fact that you don't agree with it.

Their justification, however, is that it is a self-justifying innovation. The press release makes no argument as to how this fits into Calvin's mission and tradition (a concept I think you misconstrue).

I understand very well the concepts of "mission" and "tradition", thank you very much, so if they mean something completely different than the norm with respect to Calvin in particular, then please elaborate. Some of this press release is clearly boilerplate (e.g., the president's quote), but some of it seems to synch up with what Wolterstorff and Carpenter were quoted as saying in the Chimes article.

I find the press release to be tiresome corporate-speak. I'm sure my position on this as a graduate is of little interest to the school. And my withholding of contributions probably won't register, but they won't get another dime from me. Any reasonable review of Calvin's spending habits yields the conclusion they spend money foolishly. And in my lifetime, they have gone from a very interesting and well-regarded liberal arts college to a lightly regarded university that looks more and more like hundreds of other used-to-be-distinct colleges. I have no reason to believe that the "braintrust" understands that. This same braintrust has addressed the college's fiscal issues and declining enrollment by drastically increasing the size of the administration. So, yeah, I question their judgment.[/b]

Well, you're coming at this from a pretty fixed point of view, and you seem to be tying other issues into the name-change thing. I know full well from my own experience with NPU's name change how dogmatic alumni can get about these things. I'm not discounting your point of view at all. As I keep saying, I'm at a remove from Calvin, and I personally have no dog in this fight. I'm simply pointing out that the school has never struck me as an institution that is run by heedless fools, and from what I read in the Chimes article and the press release there seems to be some pretty important endorsements to the name-change idea and some (at least on the surface) sound rationale behind it. Your opinion is as valid as anybody's. I'd like to hear more opinions from other Calvin people, though (including the members of my family who've attended the school in the recent past).

I never argued it wasn't plausible. I think it's not prudent. I'd like to know, for example, how much this costs. My own belief is that this name change is a further indication that Calvin is getting away from what once made it a really interesting place. It's becoming less interesting by the year.

Again, I'm not questioning the validity of your beliefs, which are subjective. The question about the cost of the name change is more tangible, and it's worth examining.

I respectfully disagree with both of them. As the school eviscerates its traditional strengths (history, religion, philosophy, languages, literature) it invests in the stuff students can get at a hundred other places. Everyone knows that the school has fiscal and enrollment problems. Does anyone honestly believe the name change is the solution?

Well, you should take up your disagreement with Wolterstorff and Carpenter, then. But has anybody from the school proposed that changing the name is a solution to fiscal and/or enrollment problems? I haven't seen evidence of that in either the press release or the Chimes article.

[WUPHF]

As many institutions look to compete in the market place through innovative, disruptive, boot camp-style blah, blah, blah approaches, I do think there is a tremendous opportunity for institutions to market the traditional college experience.

Marketing's another matter, though, and I'm not sure that it really enters into this. Name change or not, even with its expansion into graduate education Calvin at its core will continue to primarily be an undergraduate liberal-arts college. And I'm sure that the school will continue to market itself to prospective students in much the same manner as before, focusing upon the traditional college experience (i.e., residential undergraduate education aimed at 18-to-21-year-olds).

Everything is in some way or another a marketing decision. 

I do agree that Calvin will continue to be primarily a liberal arts college and will continue to market itself as such, but I think for marketing to the perspective American student, I think college might be a way to distinguish themselves in the market place with increasing returns over time.

Calvin ranks 5th overall in regards to international students with 476, so certainly a significant percentage of those are Canadians.

"Certainly"? Again, how significant? What are the numbers? I think it makes sense to examine the Calvin hockey roster first for evidence of a Canadian student population of any size. And yet there's only four sons of the maple leaf there amid a roster of 26.

If 10% of the international student population is Canadian, that is certainly significant by liberal arts college standards.  I do not want to question a numbers guy, but the number I found was 46 Canadian students which mean they are the third largest international student population.  I am not sure if we have many more than that in our population of 3,000 international students.

I am not sure why I mentioned that though.

I do not see Canadians as less international even if many Canadian students I have worked with over the years have seen themselves as basically American.  At least until recently.

That is a good number and I would be surprised if the administration plans to increase that percentage, though certainly the average degree-seeking international student is paying more than the average American student which, for what it is worth, is good for the basketball team.

In regards to the specific comment about international students, it can be extremely difficult to know from a press release to know how much that particular point matters, so I would not read too much in to it unless I knew more of the situation.

I think that that's a good point. Again, I stress that I'm only going by what I know from my own alma mater's perspective. For North Park, which had had a long-standing tradition of enrolling international students (particularly from Sweden, Norway, and South Korea), it mattered a great deal. In fact, feedback from both international alumni and then-current international students played a pivotal role in driving the name change back in '96.

I am not sure I was clear on my point.

I think it is useful to consider the name change in the global context, but the fact that the point appeared in a press release does not necessarily mean that it was a primary consideration in the name change process.

I do agree that there is confusion with the use of the word college exactly as you described.

Lots of throw-away comments in my posts, but if it involves college finances, marketing or international students, then I'll surely have something to say.

[WUPHF]

Interestingly, 30% of Calvin students are legacy admits.

I am 100% that no institution in Missouri can claim that and I am not sure if more than one or two come anywhere close.

[HOPEful]

My eye roll wasn't that I don't believe the statement to be true, but that it's a rather ridiculous reason to change your name. The statement could literally be rephrased to, "A portion of our students don't understand what a college is." It's patronizing and superficial.

It's none of those things. You're not perceiving the intended meaning of the sentence, although to be fair I don't think it was written very clearly. In that sentence:

The college also has a large international student population for whom "university" is more visible and better understood than "college."

... the implied subject, the people who better understand "university" than "college", are the people in the home countries of the international students, not the international students themselves. It's rather absurd to consider the international students as the subjects of that sentence, because, as Calvin students, they know exactly what sort of an institution it is that they are spending a considerable amount of money to attend. But they need it to be better understood by the people back home with whom they're going to interact for the rest of their lives.

I agree, it would be absurd if calvin's international students didn't understand what sort of institution they were attending. BUT THAT'S HOW IT IS WRITTEN. You can say there is an "implied subject" all you want, but there is not contextual clues that would lead you to that assumption. I agree, there is value in being able to market your degree internationally for its true value. I agree that there certainly could be linguistic confusion between "college" and "university" for international students and their families and friends. But once again, that's not how it is written. And I have yet to see any data driven rationale that supports the change. Just ambiguities like "more visible" and "better serve our mission"...

I honestly wonder if there are decision makers at calvin who believe they are losing prospective students to Cornerstone, not because of cost of tuition, athletic scholarships, or that they genuinely like the newer buildings, neighborhood, and campus better, but solely because they are a "university" and not a "college".

That's a fair question. I'd only advise people not to leap to conclusions based upon speculation without facts. Again, I'd like to see Calvinites address this, since they're more in the know than either you or I vis-a-vis Calvin versus Cornerstone.

Again, I agree and I'm not leaping to conclusions, but commenting on the announcement itself. If done well, this could potentially be a great move for calvin. However, nothing I had read since the announcement has shown ANY evidence that this move will positively effect the the students, college, enrollment, etc.  That's not to say that it will or won't. But to me, the announcement comes off as arrogant, primarily highlighting why calvin is already great rather than giving specifics as to what the name change will hope to accomplish, how much they expect the change to cost, what the university structure will look like at calvin, why the university structure will better accomplish the missions and visions of the school, etc.

[KnightSlappy]

https://calvin.edu/offices-services/enrollment-research/reports/

A quick skim leads me to believe that Calvin hosts 37 Canadian students, a number that's apparently fallen in recent years. (I seem to remember Ontario being in the top 5 home "states" at one point in the fairly recent past.)

Thanks for the link, KnightSlappy.  I must say I'm surprised and impressed by Calvin's international student population (which doesn't suggest that their name has been a huge problem, though I understand the rationale) . . . and I'm wondering how they achieve this:

"The top five non-North American countries represented by our International students based on their citizenship are South Korea (169 students), Ghana (56 students), China (39 students), India (27 students), Nigeria (18 students), Honduras (12 students), Indonesia and Ethiopia (9 students each)."

I'm also wondering how they achieve this considering Honduras is a North American country.

[ziggy]

Forgive my ignorance regarding the organizational structure of institutions of higher learning but are there implications for what Calvin can do as a university that it couldn't do as a college?

The quoted section below (with bold emphasis added by me) suggests there is a practical distinction, kind of like how a municipality being a township means something different than being a city or how a church denomination may describe a church's form of governance as much as it describes its theology.

Calvin leaders also see the university structure combined with increased collaboration as creating a more prominent platform for the institution to express its mission through opportunities and innovation within and across disciplines, professional programs, and centers and institutes.

“A move to a university with a liberal arts foundation both names what we already do and liberates us to do that work better,” said Kevin den Dulk, political science professor at Calvin College and executive director of the Henry Institute. “I’m especially enthusiastic about using the university structure to expand our global reach, which is already considerable yet has a lot of room to grow.”

As an alumnus, I don't have a strong reaction to the news of the change one way or the other. "Calvin University" does sound strange but that's probably just because it is new and I'm sure I will get used to it. While the name will be different, the rest of the stated Vision 2030 reads to me very much like an affirmation of the tradition Calvin has been built upon rather than any sort of departure from the fundamentals of the school that I know and love: https://calvin.edu/about/who-we-are/

[sac]

Cornerstone and Spring Arbor Universities have both used their global reach to establish strip mall campuses across the state.  Establishing Calvin branch campuses between Hobby Lobby and Chick-Fil-A's would be some sort of trifecta.

[ziggy]

Cornerstone and Spring Arbor Universities have both used their global reach to establish strip mall campuses across the state.  Establishing Calvin branch campuses between Hobby Lobby and Chick-Fil-A's would be some sort of trifecta.

I'm not much for kitsch or handicrafts but I do love me a chicken sangwich.

[Gregory Sager]

My eye roll wasn't that I don't believe the statement to be true, but that it's a rather ridiculous reason to change your name. The statement could literally be rephrased to, "A portion of our students don't understand what a college is." It's patronizing and superficial.

It's none of those things. You're not perceiving the intended meaning of the sentence, although to be fair I don't think it was written very clearly. In that sentence:

The college also has a large international student population for whom "university" is more visible and better understood than "college."

... the implied subject, the people who better understand "university" than "college", are the people in the home countries of the international students, not the international students themselves. It's rather absurd to consider the international students as the subjects of that sentence, because, as Calvin students, they know exactly what sort of an institution it is that they are spending a considerable amount of money to attend. But they need it to be better understood by the people back home with whom they're going to interact for the rest of their lives.

I agree, it would be absurd if calvin's international students didn't understand what sort of institution they were attending. BUT THAT'S HOW IT IS WRITTEN. You can say there is an "implied subject" all you want, but there is not contextual clues that would lead you to that assumption.

Actually, that's how I read it the first time, and every time since. I had no problem discerning the intended meaning, because the implication that "for whom 'university' is more visible and better understood than 'college'" is meant in a possessive sense for the "whom" rather than a receptive sense is so clear. As I said, it's not a well-written sentence. But the context does lead the reader in that direction, because, as I said, it would be absurd to consider Calvin's international students to be the ones who are clueless that an American college can be a stand-alone, degree-granting institution of higher learning when they're actually attending an American stand-alone, degree-granting college with the full intention of receiving said degree.

It would be a better sentence if more context was provided preceding the sentence, explaining that the word "college" means different things overseas than it does here in the States.

I agree, there is value in being able to market your degree internationally for its true value. I agree that there certainly could be linguistic confusion between "college" and "university" for international students and their families and friends. But once again, that's not how it is written. And I have yet to see any data driven rationale that supports the change. Just ambiguities like "more visible" and "better serve our mission"...

Exactly what other sort of data are you looking for? Data needs a context, too.

I have seen one data-driven rationale provided. And that's that Calvin is a school with a very large international-student population -- 12% of the student body is a pretty significant slice of the pie chart -- and for many of them it's a problem to have to return home with a diploma that says "College" on it and not "University".

I honestly wonder if there are decision makers at calvin who believe they are losing prospective students to Cornerstone, not because of cost of tuition, athletic scholarships, or that they genuinely like the newer buildings, neighborhood, and campus better, but solely because they are a "university" and not a "college".

That's a fair question. I'd only advise people not to leap to conclusions based upon speculation without facts. Again, I'd like to see Calvinites address this, since they're more in the know than either you or I vis-a-vis Calvin versus Cornerstone.

Again, I agree and I'm not leaping to conclusions, but commenting on the announcement itself. If done well, this could potentially be a great move for calvin. However, nothing I had read since the announcement has shown ANY evidence that this move will positively effect the the students, college, enrollment, etc.  That's not to say that it will or won't. But to me, the announcement comes off as arrogant, primarily highlighting why calvin is already great rather than giving specifics as to what the name change will hope to accomplish, how much they expect the change to cost, what the university structure will look like at calvin, why the university structure will better accomplish the missions and visions of the school, etc.

I wouldn't characterize it as "arrogant". (Then again, I'm not on the opposite side of The Rivalry. ) I do agree that it leaves an awful lot unsaid with regard to the specifics behind the name-change decision, but there's only so much that a press release can do.

In my estimation, it would be in Calvin's best interest to post online the comprehensive findings of that six-month study, because it's apparent that right now the school is just opening itself up to an awful lot of second-guessing of the sort that we've seen here over the past couple of days.

Forgive my ignorance regarding the organizational structure of institutions of higher learning but are there implications for what Calvin can do as a university that it couldn't do as a college?

The quoted section below (with bold emphasis added by me) suggests there is a practical distinction, kind of like how a municipality being a township means something different than being a city or how a church denomination may describe a church's form of governance as much as it describes its theology.

Calvin leaders also see the university structure combined with increased collaboration as creating a more prominent platform for the institution to express its mission through opportunities and innovation within and across disciplines, professional programs, and centers and institutes.

"A move to a university with a liberal arts foundation both names what we already do and liberates us to do that work better," said Kevin den Dulk, political science professor at Calvin College and executive director of the Henry Institute. "I'm especially enthusiastic about using the university structure to expand our global reach, which is already considerable yet has a lot of room to grow."

As an alumnus, I don't have a strong reaction to the news of the change one way or the other. "Calvin University" does sound strange but that's probably just because it is new and I'm sure I will get used to it. While the name will be different, the rest of the stated Vision 2030 reads to me very much like an affirmation of the tradition Calvin has been built upon rather than any sort of departure from the fundamentals of the school that I know and love: https://calvin.edu/about/who-we-are/

I can only speculate as to what they meant by "university structure", but my guess is that it could mean a looser organizational chart, with specific schools (that may or may not be called "colleges") taking on semi-autonomous aspects in terms of budgeting, administrative oversight, staffing, registration, degree requirements, and/or any other number of matters. That sounds like an excuse to add a lot more administrative staff, but it doesn't necessarily work that way -- schools can function simultaneously within the undergraduate and graduate levels, cutting out the need for administrative duplication between degree levels.

That's not the only university model out there, but it's one possibility. WUPHF could probably outline other university models.

[HOPEful]

In my estimation, it would be in Calvin's best interest to post online the comprehensive findings of that six-month study, because it's apparent that right now the school is just opening itself up to an awful lot of second-guessing of the sort that we've seen here over the past couple of days.

This. A thousand times, this.

[WUPHF]

I can only speculate as to what they meant by "university structure", but my guess is that it could mean a looser organizational chart, with specific schools (that may or may not be called "colleges") taking on semi-autonomous aspects in terms of budgeting, administrative oversight, staffing, registration, degree requirements, and/or any other number of matters.

I think you are right about this, though the notion of adding a university structure has been used to change the nature of shared governance to give the administration more power.  It happens, but I doubt that is happening in this case.