UMass Amherst was named after its beloved hometown of Amherst but apparently its hometown isn’t so beloved anymore. After years of bearing the town’s name, the university now wants to drop Amherst and keep the UMass.

Like Penn State, which has campuses all over Pennsylvania and does not carry its respective town names, UMass would like to mirror Penn State’s success with changing its own name. 

According to UMass graduates, the Amherst tag detracts from the university's prestige and success as a public university. The university spokesman, Patrick Callahan, sees the school name as a symbol of pride in its historic town roots. Because graduates want their degrees to be among the best public university degrees, they believe that the name change will put them on the map with UMich and Penn State. 

Alternately, I think a university's name does not have much to do with its reputation. When prospective students are flipping through the pages of their Princeton Review booklets, they are looking at numbers - the professor to student ratio, the amount of student housing, the proximity to local cities and of course, current students' GPA's.

But if the UMass Amherst grads are hellbent on wanting to sound fancier then maybe they should consider vouching for the school's already existing name - I personally always mistake UMass Amherst with Amherst - a far better (and private) liberal arts college.