Hail Ants:
In the US there’s no difference between a college and a university
There’s slight variation in the terminology in the UK too. There is the 16-18 college Lobsang mentioned (sometimes called sixth-form college). However, some fee-paying schools for a slightly larger age range also call themselves colleges. Cambridge and Oxford universities have yet another kind of college, which is an institution operating as an administrative and residential sub-unit of the university - somewhat similar in function to a sorority or fraternity house.
This is also prevalent in the US, many universities here have colleges following that model (I wouldn’t be suprised if they were following the Oxbridge model.)
I don’t know if I’m totally out to lunch on this, but I’ve noticed that “university” tends to be the entire institute of higher education. “College” tends to be a part of the university that specializes in a field. So you’d have, say, Whassamata Wit U, with colleges of medicine, engineering, liberal arts and science, journalism, etc, etc.
Even though it seems like it’s been covered pretty well, I can’t help but throw in my own take.
Different school districts go about this in many different ways. My own school had elementary school (grades kindergarten through 5th plus an optional pre-kindergarten), junior high (grades 6th through 8th), and senior high (grades 9th through 12th). Instead of junior high school, some call it middle school (as my district does now). Some have intermediate school instead of junior high school or as a stage in schooling just before going to junior high school or middle school.
Junior high or middle and senior high schools are all considered secondary school. Elementary, grade, and primary school are all considered primary school. Intermediate school seems to vary depending on what grades it encompasses. As has been said, there is no real uniformity on this.
According to way my district went about it, I was eleven when I moved from elementary to junior high and fourteen when I moved from junior high to senior high. Everyone had to attend senior high school at least until he or she was sixteen and could then drop out. As an incentive to keep the youngsters in school, though, you had show proof of school attendance in order to get and renew your drivers license (at least until age eighteen).
Almost every school has a homecoming game, which is a home football game where the alumni usually come back for a big slice of nostalgia for the “good ol’ days.” Some high schools make this the last home game of the season; some, like mine, had it in the middle of the season (our final home game was the senior game where we celebrated the football, marching band, drill team, and cheerleading seniors who were performing in their final home game performance of their careers).
The homecoming queen is usually a senior woman who was elected by the senior class. At halftime of the homecoming game, the five homecoming queen finalists are escorted onfield. Then the winner is announced and crowned. The homecoming king (usually a senior man) is usually announced during school time on the day of homecoming (along with the rest of the homecoming court). The homecoming court is usually made up of whoever wins the popularity contest for their class. The juniors had homecoming prince and princess, the sophomores had duke and duchess, the freshman had lord and lady. As with homecoming, their is no uniformity either. This is just how things worked with the high schools in my district.
This is someone in the 10th grade at a four-year high school. From what I know, 10th graders are usually called freshmen at three-year high schools.
These are massive tomes full of articles and pictures that the academic year. Usually, they have individual pictures of all the students along with group pictures of all the clubs, societies, and organizations. My high school’s yearbooks ran about 200 pages and cost $40.
Sorry, can’t help you on that one. We didn’t have majorettes, and I don’t know any high school that did in my area.
In Texas, all you have to do to graduate from high school was complete the requirements as dictated by the legislature and pass the statewide mandatory TAAS test. Texas had two or three different “transcripts” (or degree plans) when I was in high school. I think they were called general, advanced, and advanced with honors. The difference between them were like extra math credits, foreign language requirements, and other minors things. What they had in common was four years of English, minimum three years of math (Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II required), minimum three years of science (physical science, biology, and chemistry required), two years of physical education, and minimum three years of social sciences (US history, world history, economics/government required). The rest were electives – you could pick and choose extra courses to take (like home economics, computer science, extra math/science/social science courses, fine arts courses, etc).
The TAAS test (Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, I think – it has recently been replaced) consisted of three exam sections that involved reading, writing, and math. You had to take the exam every other year until 10th grade. The 10th grade exam was the exit-level exam. You had to pass all three sections in order to graduate. If you failed any section, you had to take that section again the following year (and possibly the year following that if you bombed it again the second time).
It’s where some members of some sororities live. It’s a college thing. In my experience, it’s usually the social fraternities and sororities that live in houses. Some of the houses are owned by the fraternities and sororities that live in them; some of the houses are owned by the university or college.
The senior proms are supposedly important because it’s the last time the class will be able to party together until the reunions start coming up. It might also be important since there’s the lore that you’re supposed to get drunk, laid, or both after the prom (see American Pie for reference among many, many others). These can be expensive deals since you’re usually expected to dress formally (and maybe arrive in a limo). And some schools have the classes raise money so that the prom can be held at a hotel or some place other than the gymnasium. And some schools also let the juniors have a prom in addition to the seniors. As always, there’s no uniformity (see a pattern yet? :))
Me? I protested the shallowness of the prom by not attending. No one cared.
A college is a school that grants a degree, usually at the end of a four year program. It is generally in a specific area, such as Liberal Arts or Engineering or some other discipline, where there may be different majors, but they are closely related. (The Liberal Arts college from which I got my B.A. granted only B.A. degrees, but they could be granted in Literature, History, or Philosophy.)
A university is a collection of colleges, organized under a single administration. In Cleveland, for example, two separate colleges, the Engineering school, Case Institute of Technology and the Liberal Arts college, Western Reserve College merged several decades ago to become Case Western Reserve University. Since that time, they have opened additional colleges, among them Medicine and Dentistry, Nursing, Law, Business, and Social Work.
There is a level of college that is a bit different. A Junior College (more often called a Community College, these days) provides a two year program that end with an Associates Degree. They are usually based in a specific region and provide a wide range of classes, both during the week and in evenings–sometimes on weekends. They provide a way for people who cannot attend college full time a way to pick up course credits to apply toward admission to a four-year program. In California, they are an integral part of the state university system. In many other places, they are sometimes regarded as remedial high school and some four-year schools will give a student a very hard time about transfering credits from them. There are both excellent and horrible Community Colleges, and one’s perspective of their worth will likely be shaped by the quality of the one closest to where one lives. (Orginally, they offered no degrees, just credits to transfer to other schools. The Associates Degree was created so that a student who completed the required courses but who could not go on to a four-year school for some reason would have something to show prospective employers for his or her efforts.)
In Buffalo, New York, there is no junior high or middle school. The public high schools have the same grade level system as private and Catholic schools:
Kindergarten through 8th grade - elementary school
9th grade (freshman) through 12th grade - high school
To make things even more confusing, Buffalo also has “early childhood centers,” which are essentially public nursery schools (pre-kindergarten), and some magnet schools with 4th through 12th grade in the same building.
Magnet schools? A Buffalo invention, magnet schools were the city’s response to forced integration. Most of the neighborhood schools in predominantly minority neighborhoods were disbanded. They were replaced with magnet schools which offered very specialized programs that would appeal to kids citywide. Instead of forcing a kid on a bus to attend a school in a questionable neighborhood, the kid can now pick a school with a specialized program that appeals to him/her.
I’ll just add my two cents here since every state is different, and I have noticed some ways in which mine, Arizona, is different from others.
I didn’t have junior high. It was called middle school when I went there and was for grades 6-8. Likewise for senior high–mine was called high school, and is for grades 9-12. Everyone stays in the educational system until age 16, at which point they can drop out or be kicked out. Generally age 16 is the junior or senior year of high school.
Our homecoming queen/king is not that important, but they are seniors elected in the fall who preside at the homecoming game (also not important) and are in the homecoming parade (likewise). However, they are majorly big deals in some other states/towns.
A sophomore is in their tenth year of school, and their second year of high school. It goes freshman (ninth grade), sophomore (tenth), junior (eleventh), and senior (twelfth).
A yearbook is a book put out at the end of the year filled with pictures of all the students with their names, color photos of the seniors, clubs, activities, occurances, and other things. It usually costs less to order it, and then costs more if you buy one once they arrive. (At my school it’s something like $40 to order, plus additions you can make, and then $50 to buy.) Students get everyone they can–friends, teachers, random students–to sign it. The more signatures you have, the more ‘popular’ you are. There is usually a class called “Yearbook” or a club of students who work for the year organizing all of this stuff.
We didn’t have majorettes at my school but I know they’re not the same as cheerleaders. Cheerleaders do fancy dances and stuff on the sidelines of sports games at school.
At my school you have to have a certain amount of credits in certain areas to graduate. Credits signify a class; a semester-long class is .5 credit, and a yearlong is usually 1 or more. At my school, there are two different types of diplomas. The regular high school diploma is the basic stuff, the state mandated requirements, while the accelerated diploma has more stuff: three lab sciences, four english, two foreign languages, and so on.
Starting in 2006 or '08, we will also have a state-regulated “AIMS test,” standing for Arizona’s Institute to Measure Standards. It’s split up into three sections and students must pass them all in order to graduate.
A sorority house is a college-only group, usually pretty exclusive, for women. The male equivalent is a fraternity.
I don’t know why proms are important, but they aren’t “just” parties. They’re usually reserved for seniors (at my school there is a separate one for just juniors), but seniors can take a member of a lower class as a date. They come at the end of the year and are MAJOR deals, even in my usually apathetic high school. If you don’t have a date, you’re unpopular, a “loser”. If you do, especially if you got a date when you’re an underclassman, you’re cool.
I’m pretty sure that’s not right, tom. I’ll have to look it up, but I believe that my PhD will be conferred by the College of Liberal Arts and Science at the University of Florida. I know that my undergraduate college (which was not part of a university) had a 5 year program terminating with a master’s degree in engineering. It’s remotely possible, since I’m not an engineer, that the master’s degree was conferred through some university or another, but since we weren’t associated with any, I don’t think that’s the case.
It may be customary, however, that usually colleges that are actually at universities are the ones that confer degrees, or some such thing. Certainly I think of universities when I think of graduate programs.
My two cents worth…
In our High School Band, we had flag girls, who did routines with flags and, occasionally, wooden rifles or battons. I was The only male flag girl. We also had a young lady who conducted the band. She kept time for us in parades and field shows, she was the equivalent of an orchestra’s conductor. She used a large (4 foot or so) Baton to lead parades, ansd a little white conductor’s batton for field shows. We had no majorettes, who do complicated batton stunts and dance numbers.
The University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s Pride of the Southland
Band has a young man who leads the band onto the field and through parades, but doesn’t conduct on the field, I believe he is a drum major, and a female who did the same thing would be a (drum) majorette.
Cheerleading has grown much more gymnastic in recent years, now cheerleaders do complicated dance numbers and much more “pile on top of one another to form pyramids” than they used to. I watched the National Cheerleading Championship on ESPN 2 a few months ago, and saw no literal cheerleading.
Senior High is usually only used formally, as part of a name, or to clarify that one is not speaking of the Junior High. Most folks just call it the High School.
The prom is The very last formal Dance of your High school years. High school is treated by adults as very romantic, because they are nostalgic for it.
I never went to any proms, because I hated High School. I was often told “these are the best years of your life” and responded with “then please shoot me, now”. High school was the worst period of my life, and I am damn glad to be rid of it.
There are Women’s Fraternities, that are distinct from sororities. I found this out when I made the faux pas of calling my (now former girlfriend) a “sorority girl” because she belonged to a Greek Letter Society.
This is the site of one such group. The site explains what the distinction between a sorority and fraternity for women is better than I could.
> Related questions: how important are these organisations, and
> is membership in effect compulsory? The image from US movies
> is that university life is dominated by intensely cliquey sororities
> and fraternities, which involve demeaning or dangerous rituals
> to join, and also severe ostracism if you don’t join. How much of
> an exaggeration are these portrayals?
Fraternities and sororities are much less important than you would think given how often they are portrayed in films. A clear majority of U.S. university students do not belong to them. Indeed, even if you eliminated those students who are more than, say, 23 years old (and that’s a significant proportion in the U.S.) and those students who are living with their families (and that’s also a significant proportion) and those students who are working full-time and going to school part-time (and that’s again a significant proportion), a clear majority of the remaining students (the ones 18-23, living on campus or just off campus, and going to school full-time) do not belong to fraternities or sororities. My undergrad college didn’t even have fraternities or sororities or intercollegiate athletic teams, and those of us who went there were happy with that. There’s no university where belonging to fraternities or sororities is mandatory. Hazing (the “dangerous rituals” you mention) are much less common than you would think and the dangerous parts of them are illegal.
The U.S. Department of Education has some say in the running of schools in the U.S., but much less so than the national government does in the U.K.
There are no equivalents to A-levels and O-levels in the U.S. In American high schools, there are tests given to the students throughout each of the courses, but these are prepared by the teacher himself. One common system is that every six weeks (since a school year is about 36 weeks, this means six times a year), each student (and/or his parents) is given a report card with a grade for each of his courses. Thus it is necessary for the teacher to give at least one test every six weeks for each course. At the end of the year, the student receives a final grade for the course, which is the average of all the tests during the course, including a long final test. This is all that a university sees by which it can evaluate the student’s work in high school. There are no national tests in the courses like A-levels or O-levels. There are the SAT and ACT tests, but they are quite different things. To be declared a high school graduate, all you have to do is pass a certain number of classes (i.e., get a passing final grade in them).
Movies tend to overestimate the significance of sports and other activities in American high schools. This is typical of Hollywood film. Studying is boring (as far as they’re concerned), while socializing makes interesting cinema. Sports and other extracurricular activities are more important in the U.S. than they are in the U.K., but they’re not quite as pervasive as you would think from films.
When I was in school, elementary school was kindergarten through eighth grade and high school was ninth through twelfth grade. There was no separate building for junior high school, but sometimes the seventh and eighth grades were referred to by that name. It is thus hard to make any generalizations about these terms. Incidentally, there is a lot of variation about whether it’s necessary to attend kindergarten. In some places it’s required (and one enters it at age 5), while in other places it isn’t (so one waits and enters first grade at age 6).
University-level institutions which serve just undergraduates (i.e., just bachelor-degree students) are usually called colleges. Places that also have graduate students (I believe the term in the U.K. is post-graduate students) and professional schools (like law schools and medical schools) are usually called universities. Thus in general colleges have a few hundred to a few thousand students, while universities in general have a few thousand to a few tens of thousand students.
However, this is further confused because most universities for administrative purposes split up their faculty and students into things that they also call colleges. For administrative purposes, each student and faculty member is a part of a college. Usually these include things like the College of Liberal Arts (i.e., all the standard humanities, science, and social sciences), the College of Education (which prepares students to teach in elementary and high schools), the College of Engineering, the College of Law, the Medical School, etc. Note that in general a student may be taking courses from a faculty member who is in a different college. These are usually administrative categories and not based on physical location, so the students and faculty of the various colleges are mixed throughout the university’s physical plant.
Fraternities were originally literary societies. The first recorded general-college fraternity was founded in 1750, when philosophy and other “higher learnings” were very well-regarded. The fraternity names of that era reflected that: Ciceronian, Calliopian, Philopeuthion. In 1776, John Health was rejected by one such society and resolved to form his own. As he was a Greek Scholar, he named it Phi Beta Kappa, thus founding the first Greek-letter fraternity. In the 1830’s, Phi Beta Kappa voluntarily revealed that its name meant “Philosophy, the Guide of Life”, and has been strictly an academic honorary organization since then (it is not only the oldest, but also the largest Greek-letter society today). However, while Phi Beta Kappa set a naming standard, not all fraternities are Greek-lettered (e.g., Triangle, Acacia, FarmHouse).
It was interesting for me in grades 7-8. When I first attended Junior High, I started in grade 7. Then, upon my return for my 8th year, the school (in keeping with the rest of the district) changed its format to Middle School, with the local high school accepting grade 9 in addition to grades 10-12. Therefore, I was in Middle School during 8th grade, thusly attending that school for only two years.
Before Kindergarden, some kids go to Nursery School (ages 3-4) or some other educational child care setting.
Middle schools are different from junior high schools–they are based on a different understanding of the development of early adolescents.
People who do not succeed in, or who drop out of, high school can get a GED, which is not a degree but a certificate that shows that the person has demonstrated mastery of the skills and knowledge typical of the high school graduate. Depending on the state’s attitude and funding, there may be separate public schools or programs within public schools for kids K-12 (that is, age 5-18) who are not successful in the regular school program. For example, my community has a high school program for adolescent criminals.
Community college–Two year programs granting an Associate of Arts or Associate of Science degree; the community college may also offer training programs that lead to a certificate, that substitute for the first two years of college, and not-for-credit classes for workers and community members.
College–A school offering a 4-year degree (Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Fine Arts). May or may not be housed in a university.
Some colleges offer a limited number of Master’s degrees–e.g., my college had one or two master’s degree students in Astronomy at any given time, and no other master’s students.
University–A school offering both 4-year undergraduate (Bachelor’s) degrees and graduate (master’s, doctoral) degrees. Common graduate (=“advanced”) degrees are PhD, EdD, JD, MD, PsyD, and there are many others. The MA and MS are the “basic” master’s programs; others are MFT, MSW, MEd and the like. The PhD is the “basic” doctorate. The other degrees indicate a more specialized professional training program at the master’s or doctoral level (e.g., MSW = Master’s of Social Work).
There are “public” and “private” schools at all levels of education. Often, but not always, public schools are subsidized by taxes, are free or cost less for state residents, and admit all students who meet basic entry requirements (such as state residency + a score above a standardized test cut-off + a grade average above a standardized test cut-off). Private schools generally cost more, have either less- or more-stringent entry standards, may have a particular focus (e.g., arts; college preparation), and can create and enforce different rules from the public scholls (e.g., may require a statement that the student professes a particular religious belief).
Yeah, my language was not clear. The advanced degree is certainly conferred by the college representing the field of study. However, I have never heard of a stand-alone college with no university association that granted an advanced degree.
You’re still a student at UoF–they take your tuition money.
I would like to note that this is not what a majorette is in my high school band nor most of the other marching bands I’ve had the privilege of seeing. (All from Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, so trends are probably different elsewhere.)
A majorette here is a baton twirler. They wear sparkly sequined uniforms as a general rule and twirl batons and weird baton-like items. Different from the colorguard/flag corps members, who toss flags and usually sabres and rifles. Generally, there aren’t too many majorettes in bands here unless it’s a large group or an exceedingly small group (much easier to have one majorette than one colorguard member, I would think). It’s just not a popular trend any more.
A drum major (always a major, even if it’s a girl…which it usually is, for some odd reason) conducts the band while in parades or out on the field. They keep the tempo and such for marching and playing. They also are generally in charge of keeping order when the band director isn’t around. Bands can have more than one or a regular drum major and an assistant drum major, etc.
Well, my alma mater (Hendrix College) has always had a very clear identity as an undergraduate liberal arts college, granting on Bachelor of Arts degrees (even in the sciences, you still get a B.A. instead of a B.S. – make of that what you will). In the last few years, however, much to my chagrin, they’ve started offering a Masters of Arts in Accounting, of all things. I understand the market-driven reasons for it, but that doesn’t make me like any better.
Other observations:
Wendell Wagner’s contention to the contrary notwithstanding, fraternities and sororities exert an influence on the social life of many institutions far beyond what their membership levels might lead you to expect. This is particularly the case at large state universities in the Southern U.S.; indeed, the farther south and larger the school, the more likely it is to be dominated by the Greek social system. I spent most of my high school years in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where my mother worked on campus at the University of Arkansas, and my father was finishing up his B.S. degree. This was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in many ways the nadir of popularity of the Greek system, yet the fraternities and sororities still exerted a hegemonic power over the entire campus. I was put off by the whole thing to such a degree that the lack of a Greek social system or football team became very high priorities for me in looking for a college. There are lots of places (indeed, probably most colleges and universities, where the Greek system is not that important, but at the campuses where it is big, it’s HUGE).
Re: majorettes/cheerleaders/etc.
In the beginning, there were drum majors, who were responsible for directing a military-style marching band during performances in a parade or on a field. Drum majors used a large baton to ensure that all of the band members were able to see their direction. Eventually, this led to a variety of tricks being performed with the baton, such as twirling it around. At some point, baton twirling became a end to itself, and became the province of female band members, trained in the art and attired in increasingly revealing and increasingly gaudy costumes. Female drum majors had indeed been called “drum majorettes” in those days, and the twirling specialists became known as “majorettes”. An entire subculture, related to the beauty pageant subculture and often consisting of the same people, grew up around this, particularly in the South (generally, in the same places where pageants are big). Small-town bands of no more the sixty or eighty members would have eight girls in their majorette corps, with one or two designated as “feature twirlers”.
In the 1970s and 1980s, however, a major change overtook the marching band world – drum and bugle corps developed flashy routines that depended much less on the military style of marching and much more on free-form routines and the use of flag and rifle lines, and this style began to take over the high school and college band world as well. Corps-style marching and traditional baton twirling were not particularly compatible (really elaborate twirling requires staying in more or less the same place, while in corps-style marching almost nothing is stationary for long), so most bands began to de-emphasize majorettes. In some places, however, the subculture around baton twirling was/is so strong that the band directors have been compelled to incorporate it into their corps-style bands.
At Dartmouth College, my alma mater, you can get a Ph.D. in more than a dozen areas of study. You can also get an M.D. or an MBA. That said, however, Dartmouth behaves in many ways like a university, and your generalization about colleges is probably valid in most cases. It really annoys most Dartmouth people when the College is referred to in the media as “Dartmouth University,” because we like the idea of remaining a small institution with a strong emphasis on teaching.
The term “College,” in this case, is part tradition and part philosophy. I guess an institution can call itself whatever it wants.
> Wendell Wagner’s contention to the contrary notwithstanding,
> fraternities and sororities exert an influence on the social life of
> many institutions far beyond what their membership levels
> might lead you to expect.
O.K., but note that I was replying to raygirvan’s comments. He was wondering if membership in fraternities and sororities is compulsory and if fraternities and sororities are as important as they are portrayed as being in some movies. The answer to those questions is clear. No, at no place is membership compulsory, and, no, it’s not in general as important as it shown in some movies. Yes, it is extremely important in some universities, but not in the majority of them (and even there, it’s more a matter of a group of “socially connected” students who run the student activities, while many other students just ignore that stuff). And I stick by what I said that, even if you’re only considering full-time undergraduate students aged 18 to 23 who live on or near campus, the clear majority of the students at American universities do not belong to fraternities or sororities.
Alas, this is a problem with explaining American education. The system is highly diverse and no generalization works completely.
