this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
130 points (96.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43399 readers
1934 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Are you sure?
I've always thought of universities as educational institutions funded (in part) by the state. So, tuition for "The University of Colorado" is partially subsided by the taxes people pay to the state of Colorado.
Colleges are not funded by the state, therefore have a higher tuition than universities.
At least that's the theory. However, both universities and colleges have become so profit focused, I don't know how much cheaper universities are now-a-days.
I'd also argue that a university in the U.S. is more prestigious than many colleges (the exception being Ivy league schools), because universities being cheaper means a high demand for being accepted, which means applicant need "be better" to gain admittance.
In the job market, however, you are absolutely right: college VS university - it doesn't matter.
Universities can be public or private. They are simply a collection of colleges. An example of a single college that is not part of a university would be a community college.
As for which is more prestigious, most colleges not part of a university generally only offer Associate's degrees with some offering Bachelor's degrees. Universities offer those along with graduate level degrees. You are correct that universities tend to be tougher to get into.
Past your first job, nobody really gives a shit where you went.
In the US there’s really no set differentiation. There’s no rules that colleges have to be private or universities have to be public. Harvard is a college (undergrad) and a university, neither are funded by the state.
The general way it works is, universities are large, colleges are small… however, there’s even exceptions to that, if I remember right there’s a university in Alaska that only enrolls like 300 people. A lot of colleges in my state are state funded because they are 2 year community colleges. A lot of our universities have 4 year liberal arts colleges at them.
As someone who lives in the US, that is not true. All universities are colleges, but not all colleges are universities. A community college is not a university.
But in the US, colloquially every 4 year school is a college. People say “I’m going to college.” People don’t say “I’m going to university.”
I've never referred to my university as a college.
I attended a two year community college, which I always referred to as college, and a four year state university that I always referred to as university. Otherwise, I referred to them by their acronyms, or more loosely as school.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯