"College" and "university" in American English usage

Factual Questions
21

The term college used to be narrowly defined. Generally a college was specific to a theme. For instance, a college was a business college or a medical college. Thus a business college wouldn’t have programs that dealt with medicine or the arts.

In the college were “schools.” For instance a medical college might have a “school of nursing,” a “school of medicine,” and a “school of pharmacy.”

A univeristy was an institution that would contain multiple colleges of different “themes” so to speak.

So a university might contain a medical college which would contain a school of nursing. And it would also have a business college, which would contain a school of accounting

That is how it was generally set up. Now the rules have totally changed so that none of that really applies. Some institutions that were set up like that decided to become universities and but didn’t want to change their name from college to univeristy and the hole system really just broke down.

Today they are mostly interchangable. But it does lead to confusion, for example
Boston College and Boston Univeristy which are not the same institution.

22

To confuse things even further, at least one of those (University College Falmouth) is an independent degree-awarding institution (link, primarily provided because of the great headline :wink: )

23

A lot of American universities also have a subdivision going by the name “University College,” but it’s rare that anyone outside the university would have to deal with them by that name. Very often, the university college handles a specialized area, such as non-degree courses, adult/non-traditional students, foreign students, or non-instruction-related student services.

24

Additionally there are a few American universities that have undergraduate colleges modeled after the Oxbridge pattern. Each such college has its own philosophy and course requirements, and the students who do live on campus tend to live in their colleges.

In my experience, when people refer to their college years they mean an institution offering at least bachelor’s degrees. Postsecondary vocational schools often use the word ‘college’ in their names, but their graduates don’t usually speak of their time there as their college days.

To add to the confusion there are a number of public high schools that have ‘university’ or ‘college’ in their names. I went to University High School in Los Angeles, which got its name because apprentice teachers would come over from UCLA and work as part of their practicuums. There’s a HS in Baltimore called Baltimore City College.

And now to throw on the last straw: The second oldest public HS in America, Philadelphia’s Central HS, is authorized by the State of Pennsylvania to grant bachelor’s degrees to students who finish with cumulative grades (marks) averaging 90/100 or better. Imagine that…getting your bachelor’s degree and HS diploma the same day.

25

Exapno, I love your post. I especially love this part of it. :smiley:

JRB

26

And the School of Oriental and African Studies…maybe we should just exempt the University of London from this thread entirely? Then there’s the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, also awarding degrees by itself…

27

Some American universities do preserve a “college=undergraduate” distinction in their formal organization; Harvard University includes Harvard College as its undergraduate division, along with a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and various professional schools (Harvard Law School; Harvard Business School). Similarly, the University of Chicago includes the College of the University of Chicago as its undergrad division, along with several graduate divisions (such as Division of the Biological Sciences or the Division of the Humanities) and professional schools (Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago Law School).

28

Agreed, and I acknowledge this in the paragraph you quote, but these distinctions generally don’t show up in how people actual refer to the schools. They are merely internal administrative divisions. (No one would say they attended Harvard College. They’d say Harvard University. You wouldn’t even put Harvard College on something official like a curriculum vitae.)

29

Actually, I always thought that graduates of Harvard College make a point of saying that they went to Harvard College, never Harvard University. They’re college men, doncha know.

It’s true that the norm for a curriculum vitae would be to cite Harvard University, but a quick check of Google finds thousands of hits that cite Harvard College.

30

I dunno about those Harvard guys, but you’d have to be awfully high-hat to put something like “1992 – B.A., The College of the University of Chicago”–you’d just say “1992 – B.A., University of Chicago”. On the diploma, though, it would say that the degree was granted by The College of The University of Chicago. I suppose diplomas are always pretty snooty.

31

This causes a lot of confusion among my British and Australian friends over here. Apparently, a “college” back in their neck of the woods is what we Americans would call a “high school.” Yes, in the US a single university is generally made up of several colleges – the College of Engineering, the College of Arts and Sciences – the university pulling them all together into a “univers-al” entity. Some entire institutes, such as Saint John’s College, are not universities because they tend to focus on a specific area.

It gets complicated in Thailand, which is forever trying to strike a balance between American and British usage. (For instance, some buildings here you walk in at the ground floor and take the elevator or stairs up to the first floor like in the UK; other buildings you walk in at the first floor, which is also the ground floor, like in the US. The best that I can figure is it depends on which country the owner of the construction company went to school in or at least preferred.) At Chulalongkorn University, the top educational institute here, there are both colleges, such as the College of Public Health and the College of Population Studies, AND faculties, such as the Faculty of Economics. To add to the confusion, I happen to know that the College of Population Studies changed it’s name at one point from the Faculty of Population Studies, for reasons known only to them.

32

IME, “college” and “university” are used differently in Canada than in the US. I live in Alberta, but I’m pretty sure that usage is the same across Canada.

Here, a “college” is higher education after high school, usually consisting of one-year and two-year certificate and diploma programs. Sometimes a college will offer classes covering the first year or two of a four-year undergraduate degree, but a student would have to transfer to a university to finish their degree. Similarly, there are various technical schools that also offer one- and two-year programs of a more technical-skill-oriented nature.

A “university” is also higher education after high school, but it’s an institution that offers four-year undergraduate bachelor degrees (Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Arts, etc…). The university I attended (the University of Alberta), didn’t really have “sub-colleges” within it - instead, each group of studies was a “faculty” (faculty of engineering, faculty of science, faculty of nursing, etc…). A university may or may not have an associated medical school or law school, and a university may or may not offer graduate degrees (Masters or PhD) or post-graduate studies.

The Canadian magazine Macleans publishes an issue each year with rankings of Canadian universities. For ease of comparison, they break the universities down into different categories, but they’re still all universities. The categories they use are “Primarily Undergraduate” (has relatively few graduate programs), “Comprehensive” (has a range of undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs), and “Medical Doctoral” (has a broad range of PhD programs and research, and medical schools).

I’m pretty sure that in Canada calling your institute of learning a “college” or “university” is a legal thing, and they can’t just decide to use “university” if they don’t offer accredited four-year undergraduate degrees.

For example, in Edmonton there is Concordia University College. It used to be called Concordia College, and it only offered one- and two-year programs. In the mid-90s, they changed their name to Concordia University College, because by that point they were allowed by the province to begin granting four-year degrees.

Similarly, Grant MacEwan College is also in Edmonton, but they changed their name in 2006 to just “MacEwan” (omitting the word “college”), because at that time they became an accredited degree-granting institution.

33

I don’t think the U.S. System is as confusing as many of you are making out. There are at least two separate issues here.

First, when an American talks about where she “went to college,” she is talking about the institution where she got her bachelor’s degree. Whether the institution she attended is called a “university,” an “institute” or a “college,” doesn’t matter. If I ask someone where they went to college, it would be perfectly natural for her to say “I went to MIT,” or “I went to Harvard,” or I went to “Amherst.”

The term “college” refers to an institution that grants undergraduate, aka bachelor’s degrees. There are exceptions, but that is by far and away the general rule. The term “University” refers to an institution that grants graduate and/or professional degrees. In many cases, a college is part of a larger university. so, Harvard College is part of Harvard University, along with Harvard medical school, Harvard law school, etc. that are also part of Harvard University.

Yes, there are exceptions. There are a few institutions that are over a century old, such as Dartmouth, that call themselves colleges even though they also grant graduate degrees.

There is also some confusion because, as noted above, certain undergraduate institutions are divided into multiple colleges. For example, UCSD has multiple colleges. But if you ask someone who got their Bachelors degress from UCSD where they went to college, they are not going to say they went to Ravelle College or Marshall College. They are going to say they went to UCSD.

If someone asks me where I went to college, I say Wesleyan, even though the name of the institution is Wesleyan University (and that’s what it says on my diploma).

If you are in an academic graduate program, you say you went to “graduate school.” If you were in a professional program, you usually refer to it by type of school. Someone who went to Hastings College of Law would never say they went to “college” at Hastings. They would say that they went to “law school” at Hastings.

34

‘Law school’ is one which, I think, does cross over between American and British usage. How about ‘drama school’?

35

In the U.S., post-secondary institutions that primarily have similar one to two year programs are usually known as “community colleges” or “junior colleges.” They will typically offer an Associate of Arts or Associate of Science (or perhaps some specialized associates degrees) after a two-year (full time equivalent) program. Some programs are the equivalent of the first two years of a bachelor’s program, and others are more vocationally specialized. In some states, the community colleges are set up so two-year graduates can fairly seamlessly transition into bachelors programs in the state college/university systems. Otherwise, transfer to another institution can be a bit chaotic.

36

True, at least that’s what college usually means in New Zealand. But … not all high schools are called colleges. Some are called high schools and a few are called grammar schools which sounds very old and British but I don’t think it means anything much in practice these days.

In NZ the word “varsity” is simply used as an abbreviation of university. Someone will “go to varsity”. In the US I think it has something to do with sports. Australians talk about “going to uni”.

37

Just to add to the fun, in the UK, the University of Cambridge is made up of a number of “Schools” for teaching/research purposes e.g. School of Arts & Humanities, School of Physical Sciences, etc and each of these is made up of various Faculties, Faculty of English, Faculty of Physics and Chemistry, etc. The Colleges are self contained institutions that will have Fellows and students attending many or all of them. :smack: