In American English, the word, in contrast to its many and varied British meanings, almost always refers to undergraduate university studies or to a school providing professional or technical training on a (loosely) comparable level. It can therefore refer to both a self-contained institution that has no graduate studies and to the undergraduate school of a full university (i.e. that also has a graduate school). The usual practice in the United States today is to use "university" in the official names of institutions made up of several faculties or "schools" and granting a range of higher degrees while "college" is used in the official names of smaller institutions only granting bachelor's or associate's degrees. (See liberal arts colleges, community college). Nevertheless, several prominent American universities, including Boston College, Dartmouth College and the College of William and Mary, have retained the term "college" in their names for historical reasons or because of an undergraduate focus, although they offer higher degrees. This problem led, in part, to the threatened lawsuit between Yale College Wrexham (equivalent to an American "high school") and Yale University, the latter claiming trademark infringement.[citation needed] As of 2003, there were 2,474 four-year colleges and universities in the United States.[2]

Usage of the terms varies among the states, each of which operates its own institutions and licenses private ones. In 1996 for example, Georgia changed all of its four-year colleges to universities, and all of its vocational technology schools to technical colleges. (Previously, only the four-year research institutions were called universities.) Other states have changed the names of individual colleges, many having started as a teachers' college or vocational school (such as an A&M — an agricultural and mechanical school) that ended up as a full-fledged state university.

It should be noted, too, that "university" and "college" do not exhaust all possible titles for an American institution of higher education. Other options include "institute" (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), "academy" (United States Military Academy), "union" (Cooper Union), "conservatory", and "school" (Juilliard School), although these titles are only for their official names. In colloquial use, they are still referred to as "college" when referring to their undergraduate studies.

The term college is also, as in the United Kingdom, used for a constituent semi-autonomous part of a larger university but generally organized on academic rather than residential lines. For example, at many institutions, the undergraduate portion of the university can be briefly referred to as the college (such as The College at The University of Pennsylvania, Harvard College at Harvard, or Columbia College at Columbia) while at others each of the faculties may be called a "college" (the "college of engineering", the "college of nursing", and so forth). There exist other variants for historical reasons; for example, Duke University, which was called Trinity College until the 1920s, still calls its main undergraduate subdivision Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. Some American universities, such as Princeton, Rice, and Yale do have residential colleges along the lines of Oxford or Cambridge, but the name was clearly adopted in homage to the British system.[citation needed] Unlike the Oxbridge colleges, these residential colleges are not autonomous legal entities nor are they typically much involved in education itself, being primarily concerned with room, board, and social life. At the University of California, San Diego, however, each of the six residential colleges does teach its own core writing courses and has its own distinctive set of graduation requirements.

Finally, some institutions, such as the University of Chicago use the term "college" to distinguish their undergraduate program from their graduate and research programs.


Harvard Yard
[edit] The origin of the U.S. usage
The founders of the first institutions of higher education in the United States were graduates of the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge. The small institutions they founded would not have seemed to them like universities — they were tiny and did not offer the higher degrees in medicine and theology. Furthermore, they were not composed of several small colleges. Instead, the new institutions felt like the Oxbridge colleges they were used to — small communities, housing and feeding their students, with instruction from residential tutors (as in the United Kingdom, described above). When the first students came to be graduated, these "colleges" assumed the right to confer degrees upon them, usually with authority -- for example, the College of William and Mary has a Royal Charter from the British monarchy allowing it to confer degrees while Dartmouth College has a charter permitting it to award degrees "as are usually granted in either of the universities, or any other college in our realm of Great Britain."

Contrast this with Europe, where only universities could grant degrees. The leaders of Harvard College (which granted America's first degrees in 1642) might have thought of their college as the first of many residential colleges which would grow up into a New Cambridge university. However, over time, few new colleges were founded there, and Harvard grew and added higher faculties. Eventually, it changed its title to university, but the term "college" had stuck and "colleges" had sprung up all over the United States.



 

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