this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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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)_/¯
Sometimes it's not just us Europeans who forget that the USA is a fucking huge place ;)