I’ve been weighing up whether or not to wade in on this college/uni debate with a bit of pedantry but I feel like I might as well.
To say that college is the name given for a lower form of education, as well as being a bit intellectually snobbish, is not actually true.
I believe the reason why the two terms even exist is that technically a university is a postgraduate institution and a college is an undergraduate institution. So you only actually technically join the university of Cambridge when you get your bachelors degree and you are just affiliated with, say, Kings before that. More modern universities obviously did away with all of this collegiate system - so the vast majority of students attended the university of x (usually the name of a place.)
Thus in both British and Irish tradition the world college has been used for varying institutions that provide education at varying ages:
1. A school that takes pupils below the age of 18 e.g. Eton college - these are usually independent schools.
2. Institutions that provide tuition in a levels and equivalent for 17-18/9 year olds e.g. The Hills Sixth form college.
3. An institution that provides specialised training for adults e.g. agricultural and catering colleges - these may or may not award degrees but they will provide some form of certification.
4. Institutions within a body of a university which provide tuition and accommodation for adult students & which they actually officially join e.g. Christchurch college, Oxford. However, the degrees themselves are awarded by the University of Oxford.
5. institutions that provided higher education but have a connection with a university to provide the degree certification e.g. the now defunct Heythrop College.
I think the fact that these terms have historically been used in varying and interchangeable ways is best illustrated by the case of Trinity College, Dublin which is the only college of the university of Dublin so say you attend both college and university at the same time
en.m.wikipedia.org
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I believe a lot of older universities around the Americas especially are modelled on the collegiate systems of Oxbridge hence why we tend to say Harvard College as the name of the institution their undergraduates join because this is following the old undergrad = college/ postgrad= university split.
I hope this clears up any confusion of people getting annoyed by people saying college - it’s actually a complicated and confusing system.
add on: I just looked this up out of interest and W attended St Andrew’s - which has a reliquary of a collegiate system.
Therefore, if we were being SUPER pedantic, we could say that W attended United College, St Andrew’s while he was an undergraduate and fully joined the University of St Andrews upon obtaining his degree. However, it would be more usual parlance to say: W did geography at St Andrew’s.
I wish these articles would stop referring to any individual who has a passing interest in the royal family as being a royal expert. At this point we are as much royal experts as the people they are quoting.
www.express.co.uk
en.wikipedia.org
