Template talk:Colleges and universities in Los Angeles County, California

re:California State University, Bakersfield
Wouldn't that be in Kern County? --MarsRover (talk) 22:30, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Right, I took care of it. Amerique dialectics 22:50, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Major revision to table
I made several significant changes to the template. I shortened schools' names, including deleting "University" and "College" whenver possible. (If I got any shortened names wrong, please fix it.) I also merged the Cal State schools' links, and similarly added the individual Claremont schools while still grouping them together. YLee (talk) 06:31, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Pomona/Cal Poly Pomona
User:Ylee reverted my edits linking California State Polytechnic University, Pomona as Cal Poly Pomona saying that there was no CSU Pomona to disambiguate. My concern is not disambiguation, it's that "Pomona" or "CSU Pomona" isn't used as a name for the school. Most reliable sources use Cal Poly Pomona as a short form. --TorriTorri(Talk to me!) 21:01, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
 * My only concern was consistency with the other Cal State schools' links and balancing accuracy and succinctness. I am happy to have it changed back to "Cal Poly Pomona" if spelling that out is overall preferable to succinctness and consistency. YLee (talk) 21:56, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Three years later I've reedited the template to just say "Pomona". This is consistent with the usage on the Cal State template. Ylee (talk) 09:24, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Private v for profit categories
My recent edit of the template was to use a non-POV term in describing all of the non-public schools. Personally, I have no concern about whether a school (university, college, etc.) is public, private, non-profit, for profit, religious, etc. But I note that Higher education in the United States sticks to public, private, liberal arts, and community colleges, and does not (for the most part) parse out these different types, so I ask why does this template? More importantly, the For-profit school article (which should explain the differences) has two problems. One, it is tagged WP:CSB. Two, it has new and unbalanced material critical of for-profit schools based, perhaps, on recent news reports. With these factors in mind, I wondered about some of the Private university schools listed. With some of them, we cannot tell if they are non-profit or profit. (See, for example, Antioch University. Antioch is listed as a corporation with the California Secretary of State.  Another example is FIDM.) So, certainly we should have more templates, right? Perhaps yes -- for the for-profit private universities and the not-for-profit private universities. AND perhaps we should have different templates for the religious schools vs. non-religious schools! After all, if a school's profit agenda is part of an editor's evaluation, shouldn't a school's religious agenda be part of our evaluation? And perhaps we should take this parsing one step further -- some relig:ious based schools incorporate religious studies as a mandatory part of their academic program while other do not. (See, e.g., Bible college.) Those schools should be templated too! And don't forget the templates for Vocational university, Mens & Womens schools, military schools, predominately African-American schools, Residential colleges, work & non-work colleges, etc. My point is simple, reverting my change from the broad, neutral, understandable Private university to the value-laden for-profit category was a very subtle, albeit good faith, WP:POV move. We could not make such a change for all these other categories -- we should not do so for profit schools.--S. Rich (talk) 04:24, 9 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree, after taking a two-second look at the for-profit school article, that it looks to have an WP:UNDUE amount of criticism of the industry. That said, the difference between non-profit and for-profit private universities is a basic and, to my mind, neutral, one on the level of the difference between public and private. I have no objection to merging the private and for-profit categories if that is what is decided. Antioch and FIDM probably should be moved into "For-profit", too; good catch on those. YLee (talk) 06:17, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

I take this as agreement to merge the private and for-profit cats, thus going back to my revision. BTW, in Googling "for-profit college", we get 600k+ articles, with WP coming up first, after which the recent for-profit controversy was the subject. The pro and anti articles were fairly evenly split. With the recent topicality in mind, I think WP:NPOV demands that we steer clear (or is it stear cleer?) of going beyond the broadly encompassing, understandable, and appropriate Public/Private University classifications. Again, we can parse out private U's into religious, ethnic, etc., categories (which are just as basic) but doing so will likely lead to confusion. E.g., how would we classify a private, historically African-American, religious based/sponsored, not-for-profit, women's college without an ROTC program, such as Bennett College vs. a private, historically African-American, formerly religious based/sponsored, not-for-profit, women's college with an ROTC program, such as Spelman College? Or how about an historically African-American, private, unaccredited business school, founded in 1928, in Michigan, such as the Lewis College of Business, which looks like it is a for-profit institution? (And the navtemplates for these three schools do not parse the for-profit/not-for-profit categories.)--S. Rich (talk) 19:17, 9 October 2010 (UTC)