seems much territory has been covered here … from what i come away with is that university offers higher level of education … and usually promotes higher degree. mixtures of ethnicity portray a vital paradoxy in determining which term is used.
in the past i had not given much thought to the whole quandary, because i never attended ‘college’ … only technical school (early 80’s). the past few years, while on another social board … my profile had incited me to explaining what academia consisted of.
while there are clear-cut definitions between, say, teachers 'n professors 'n doctors … there is definitely less segregation between colleges and universities. and i use the term ‘segregation’ loosely … perhaps i could scope out a more apt term.
again, thanks heartily for everyone’s involvement. there were some humorous responses … as well as quite passionate orations … even some candid quixotism. y’all have been very much appreciated.
To pile on: In US usage, “<preposition> university” (with no article) is not really seen. In other constructions, “university” and “college” have little distinction except in special circumstances where you know the listener is privy to the special circumstances. As a US English speaker, I say “I went to college” even though I’ve never attended any institution of higher learning with “college” in the name.
The institutions he attended were called universities. Maybe some of them had administrative departments with “college” in the name, but that’s an administrative detail that would rarely come up in conversation.
I attended the University of Metropolis. I don’t say that I attended a specific department of that university (except in the case of certain post graduate professional schools, in which case I would say “I went to medical school st …”). The fact that that university has a College of Liberal Arts and a College of Science and Mathematics is not relevant to this conversation.
I used to just say “I graduated from college” or “I went to college at…” because that is the common phrasing used in the USA. Over time I realized that, on this planet, there are a lot more people who say “I went to university” than “I went to college” and in my case anyway, it is more accurate to refer to university instead of college so I just switched.
Now I have to put up with some other Americans thinking I’m a poseur Europhile or whatnot. I don’t care. It makes more sense to refer to university.
To further complicate matters, there are the federated universities. University of Toronto is one such; you may be a student in the Faculty of Arts and Science, but you will be part of a college within the University. In the U of T’s case, you might be a student of New, St. Mike’s, Victoria, University College, Trinity, or a few others. It seems more for administrative purposes than anything else; regardless of your college, you can choose courses from any and all colleges. At any rate, upon graduation, you will always get a University of Toronto degree, but you will always be, for example, a New College student.
I went to U of Toronto for my bachelor’s (“I graduated from my college and from university!”–how weird does that sound to our American friends?), and was used to the federated system. I was surprised when I attended U of Alberta, and found that the Faculty of A&S had no colleges. The U of A was not a federated university, and while it had various faculties (arts & science, law, medicine, dentistry, engineering, etc.), nobody got their B.Sc. or B.A. from a federated college plus the university; it was just from the university.
It didn’t affect me, as I was a student in the Faculty of Law, but it was weird to realize that U of A undergrads were not divided up into colleges, as they were at U of T.
That’s OK. We have so many campuses, we need to add at least one more letter anyway. For example, I’m from UCD, or UC Davis. (Do alumni say “I’m from” in other countries?) The original University of California mostly goes by Berkeley or Cal.
Are we talking about University of Phoenix type things?
I live in California, i teach in the CSU system, i have many friends who teach in the UC and CSU system, and my wife did her undergrad degree at Berkeley.
I have never—not once—heard anyone here say “I’m from” when referring to where they went to college. I asked my wife, and she’s never heard it either.
I don’t know that I can say that I’ve never heard someone use “I’m from {University/College}” in the US, but it’s certainly not the term I commonly hear. The term, “I’m from {x}” is usually used when people are talking about their hometowns / where they grew up, not their schools. At least in the Midwest, it’s “I went to {School}”, or, if someone got an advanced degree, they might say something like, “I got my MBA at {School}.”
I’m a foreigner and I found it very difficult to assimilate that in the US I had to refer to the University I was attending as “college”. In Spain, a colegio is either a professional association to which one must belong in order to be able to exercise that profession, or a private secondary school; in ESL, British-English based lessons, it had always been “university” or “uni”.
My experience has been that in the US you’d only use university if naming the whole institution, not to indicate that you’re at that study level.
Never come to Cape Town. It’s either Uni or Varsity, or just Campus, very rarely the full University. And this usage includes by multi-doctoral academics, English postdocs, Nobel-winning writers…
Thinking it through, it’s not something I’d say when the conversation first touched on college/university. Only after a few people had already listed where they got their degree, when the expectation was that everyone would now be adding to the list.
I missed this originally, although I pointed it out in my response. When I used the phrase with Americans, it was pointed out to be unidiomatic in American English.
Here’s a thread back from 2002 while I was still living abroad when I tried to say that Americans do say “I went to university” and was quickly informed that it’s not a US usage. I expressed skepticism at first, but came to the conclusion that I was, in fact, influenced by the British use of the term in my time living abroad (at that point, it had been four years.) Since returning to the US, it’s one of those expressions I had to change and I looked out to see if any other Americans used that phrasing and, so far, I have not noted anyone born & raised in the US using that construction.
