What Is The Actual Difference Between University And College: A Parent’s Guide For High School Seniors
Last Tuesday, my 17-year-old Lila was sprawled across our kitchen table, garlic bread crumbs dusting the crumpled printout of her application list, when she looked up and asked the question I realized I’d never gotten a straight answer to: “What’s the actual difference between a university and a college? Did I label all these wrong?”
I’d used the words interchangeably my whole life. When people ask where I went to school, I say “college,” even though my school was technically a university. My neighbor talks about her kid “going off to college” when he attends NYU, which is a university, and I’ve heard grandparents sniff that a “college isn’t as good as a university” like it’s a hard, unchanging rule. I texted my old friend Mara, who’s been a college counselor at our local high school for 22 years, and she called me back while she waited for her daughter to finish soccer practice, laughing at the question.
“Everyone gets this wrong,” she said. “The old rule of thumb is that colleges only offer undergraduate bachelor’s degrees, and universities have graduate and professional programs too—like law school, med school, master’s programs—on top of undergrad. But that rule went out the window 30 years ago.”
She reminded me that Boston College is called a college, but it has a full law school, business school, and dozens of graduate programs. Amherst College, one of the most competitive liberal arts schools in the country, is still called a college even though it’s a four-year, private undergraduate institution with a massive endowment. The name is mostly tradition at that point, not a description of what the school offers.
Then there are community colleges, which almost all carry the “college” name. A lot of parents I talk to assume community college is only for students who couldn’t get into a university, but that’s not true anymore. My neighbor’s son did two years at our local community college, finished all his general education requirements for less than $4,000 total, then transferred to the state university to finish his engineering degree. He graduated last year with half the student loan debt of his classmates who started at the university as freshmen. Some community colleges even offer four-year degrees now in high-demand fields like nursing or teaching, so they’re far more than just two-year stopping points.
The other big confusion is when families are looking at schools outside the United States. When my cousin was applying to schools in the UK a few years back, she almost crossed Oxford off her list because she saw it is made up of dozens of colleges, and she thought that meant it wasn’t a full university. In the UK and many other Commonwealth countries, colleges are just smaller residential and academic communities within a larger university, not separate schools. In Canada, the difference is even bigger: college usually refers to vocational or 2-year pre-university programs, while university is the 4-year degree-granting institution. That’s a big gotcha for families looking across borders, and it’s easy to mix up if you’re used to US naming conventions.
After I got off the phone with Mara, Lila and I sat and went through her list line by line. She had three options she was seriously considering: our local community college’s early childhood education associate program, a small private liberal arts college in western Massachusetts that has a top environmental science program, and our big in-state public university. I used to think the “college” ones were somehow less, until we started breaking it down.
The practical thing we learned that’s helped us, and I’ve passed it on to three other parents in our neighborhood already, is this: don’t ever judge a school by whether it’s called college or university. First, pull up the program your kid wants, and check three clear things: does the school offer the exact degree they’re working toward? How much does it cost total, including tuition and housing? What’s the average class size for first and second year students? That’s it. The name doesn’t factor into any of those.
For example, the liberal arts college on Lila’s list is called a college, and it doesn’t have its own med school, but it has a 90% acceptance rate to med school for its pre-med students, because every student gets one-on-one time with professors to work on research and get recommendation letters. The big state university, called a university, has a med school, but intro biology classes are 300 people, and most first-year students never talk to their professors directly. Both are good options, they just fit different goals.
I’ve also had parents ask me if it matters for job applications later, if you went to a college vs a university. Most employers don’t care, unless you’re going into a field that requires a specific degree from an accredited institution. Again, accreditation and program reputation matter more than the name.
We’re visiting all three schools next month. Lila still keeps changing her mind about what she wants to study, and which one feels right. She swears one week she wants to teach preschool, the next she wants to do field work on climate change. We haven’t crossed any options off the list because of their name, and that’s the biggest change from when I was applying to school 20 years ago. Back then, my parents would have turned their nose up at any option called “college” that wasn’t an elite liberal arts school. Now we know the name’s just a name. What matters is what fits Lila, not what it says on the welcome sign when you drive onto campus.
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