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Reader question:
In your article (The graduate - who is he?), you used "college students". Why not "university students"? Is there any difference between a college and a university?
My comments:
Broadly speaking, universities and colleges are the same. Between them, there are minor differences, sometimes more in name than substance and varying from country to country.
The word college is from Latin (collegium). Originally it referred to groups of individuals who live together under a common set of rules (con- means "together", leg-, "law"). Today, the word is most often used to mean a university, an institution of higher learning at which people study for a degree.
The word university is also from Latin (universus) - what a coincidence. A university is a college, or a collection of colleges at which people study for a degree.
A college can be a part of a university, such as the Trinity College, Cambridge in Great Britain. Here in Beijing, the Beijing Medical College under Beijing University (Beida) used to be a college on its own. It changed its name to Beijing Medical University in 1985 before its re-merger with Beida (the two had been merged and then separated previously).
Depending on how you look at it, their recent re-merger gives each school even greater prestige, or just another opportunity for personnel reshuffles at both places.
Since a college can be part of a larger university, at the subconscious level, people in China might deem a university being at a higher level than a college. It is on this account that I feel I may have wounded a few university graduates by referring to them as college graduates. I should have said "college and university" graduates to avoid confusion. Or perhaps, better still, "university and college" graduates?
However, it must be reiterated that when spoken generally, a university and a college is the same thing - a school of higher learning which gives you a degree if it lets you graduate. In Britain, people say they "attend university" whereas in America, they "go to college." In China, either description is right when people "shang da xue".
In all of these cases, people mean to study for a degree, be the school Oxford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or Quanzhou Normal College.
When I was in college for my one and only degree, it was called Beijing Foreign Studies Institute. Today, it is named Beijing Foreign Studies University.
Many other Chinese colleges and institutes changed their name to "university", i.e. Beijing Language and Culture University (formerly Beijing Language Institute, Nanjing Normal University (formerly Nanjing Normal College).
Does "university" sound more grandiose? I do not know the precise reason for the name changes - I have not cared to even ask.
What's reassuring is that you can still seek a degree in all them places and in due course (or courses to be exact), become a graduate, which status used to guarantee you a head start in finding a life-long job with a higher starting salary in this country.
Today, fewer such immediate, pecuniary, and lifetime opportunities are available and a good thing it is too. In the long run, graduates will find their college education helpful in improving themselves as persons and citizens.
To my knowledge, very few graduates truly regret their years on campus even though much of that time was spent "skipping classes" (in the words of one) and trying to make do without reading all the books "those pervert professors" (in the words of another) assign them to read.
In fact, over time, graduates will even stop calling those professors who tried to coax them to read a few more books "pervert".
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