[QUOTE=Pasta]
Could you elaborate on your friends’ situations, or do you have too many examples? So far in my life in academia, I’ve never heard anyone of any age refer to their graduate studies as “college”. Not saying you haven’t – just wondering if it is a usage that depends on location, age, discipline, or just having weird friends.
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It’s true that college is primarily used to indicate undergraduate study. But I’ve heard it used at times to distinguish the years of studying from the years out in the work world.
Grad school is used for most post-collegiate education. Postgraduate studies is mostly an academic term. I can’t remember anybody using it in casual conversation. A postdoc, on the other hand, is a common term, meaning additional research time spent after getting one’s Ph.D. but before landing a job as a professor or in industry. There’s a further confusion in that while professional schools, like law, medicine or business, are technically grad school, almost nobody refers to them as grad school. If you’re going on in English or Physics, i.e. the arts, humanities, or sciences, you’re in grad school. Otherwise you’re in law school or medical school or getting your MBA. (Nobody says business school, which has the connotation of a low-level secretarial instruction.)
The U.S. has this weird confusion of terms because it has a weird history of colleges. Unlike in Europe, in which there were a few schools associated mostly with the capital of a country or region, every sizable town immediately created a college as soon as eight or ten people were available to attend one. “Professors” were often young and barely educated themselves, just a step ahead of their students. By the mid-1850s the U.S. may have had more colleges than the rest of the world combined.
The schools didn’t resemble Oxford or Heidelberg, which were where the elite still went to get a real education. There were “normal” schools, or state teacher’s colleges; “land grant” schools, which taught the practical sciences of agriculture and mining; theological seminaries, hundreds of them to cater to the ever-splitting protestant sects; liberal arts academies, which purported to give a classical education to young gentlemen (and a few women by the end of the century); and a smattering of medical, dental, nursing, osteopathic, homeopathic, and basically pathetic institutions that turned out horrifyingly unqualified healing practitioners.
Around the turn of the century, the elite universities deliberately tried to elevate themselves from this mass by creating “professional” schools of medicine, business, law, journalism, architecture, and others, that would have true professional disciplines and curricula. Each of these was known as a college. Correspondingly, they created the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Engineering, the Music College, and so on out of the non-professional side – combining both undergraduate and graduate - to ensure prestige for those professors. The whole conglomeration became the University.
Undergraduate education was no longer as much a end in itself as a preparation for graduate work. You majored in a subject in college and then went on to take a master’s or doctorate in that subject in graduate school. This could be taken too far - Ohio University had a School of Radio-Television in its College of Communications - but as a larger and larger percent of the population went on to college, the prestige of a college degree dropped and the need for a graduate degree increased.
There are about 4000 degree-granting institutions in the U.S. today (probably including two-year community colleges or junior universities or technical schools). That total spans an enormous variation of type and quality and size. No one word satisfies that whole range. Both college and university are generalized approximations of what any one individual may have experienced.
Nobody else in the world has this history that I know of, so no wonder it confuses everybody else. It confuses a lot of us, too.
