College / university (was: branch of 'Omission of definite article')

Damien Hall djh514 at YORK.AC.UK
Thu Jan 21 11:47:23 UTC 2010

Benjamin commented that he's never heard the phrase 'at university' to
describe being in higher education, at least on the West coast of the
States. I think that's a general difference between AmE on the one hand
(here including Canada?) and BrE / Irish English on the other. My wife
(from NJ), who also works at the University, has had to consciously learn
the phrase 'at University' for talking about that here.

For the education you get between the ages of 18 and about 22, we (at least
in BrE) say 'at university' and not 'at/in college'. This is no doubt
connected to the fact that very few of the educational institutions here
that give post-18 education are called X College - the vast majority are X
University. On the other hand, quite a few such institutions in North
America are X College (though I wouldn't like to say whether the BrE
expression arises because of the names of our institutions of higher ed, or
_vice versa_).

Since we use 'at university' for being a student post-18, there's a gap for
a meaning for the expression 'at college', and (in BrE at least) it is more
likely to refer to institutions of further education (ages 16-18). These
two years of schooling are often handled as the last two years in a school
where you have been since age 11 (a 'secondary school', 'grammar school',
'academy', etc), but it is also common for such schools to be for ages
11-16 only. The separate institutions for ages 16-18 are often called
'colleges' or, more fully, 'sixth-form colleges'.*

There's the further wrinkle that, at least at Oxbridge, 'in College' means
'physically at one's College of allegiance / residence etc'. So one is
asked whether one will be 'dining in College', 'living in College', etc,
and classes are either 'in College' or not. I don't know whether this usage
extends to other UK Collegiate universities (Durham, York, Lancaster, etc),
but I suspect not, as the Colleges elsewhere don't mean quite as much as
they do at Oxbridge. I am at York at the moment, for example (but I'm not a
student, so only see their habits second-hand); here, the Colleges really
are just dorms, though they try to foster College loyalty and are trying to
raise their profile. All the Colleges here are together on one campus. At
Oxford, by contrast, you enter and leave the university with others from
your College, your degree certificate mentions your College prominently,
and the Colleges are separaate collections of buildings throughout the
city, with non-University buildings in between; it's even been said that
there is no (sense of a) corporate university at Oxford, but that it's
really a collection of Colleges loosely organised in the same city. That's
overstating the case, but you get the point.


(*More notes if you're interested in British educational nomenclature:) The
'sixth-form' part comes from the system of private education, where the
twelve years of schooling are often grouped in twos, so you start in Lower
First, go on a year later to Upper First, then to Lower Second, until at
age 16 you arrive in the Lower Sixth and at age 17 in the Upper Sixth, your
final year of pre-university education. 'Lower Sixth' and 'Upper Sixth'
spread beyond private education quite some time ago, so that, in my
state-run secondary school, we had Years 1 to 5 from age 11 to 16, then the
Lower Sixth and Upper Sixth. My sister, on the other hand, privately
educated at secondary level, started her secondary education at age 11 in
the Upper Third (of a school which catered for girls from 4 to 18 and thus
had the full numbering system from Lower First, I believe, on up). At 12
she entered the Lower Fourth, and so on, until, like me, at 16 she entered
the Lower Sixth.

Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
YO10 5DD

Tel. (office) +44 (0)1904 432665
     (mobile) +44 (0)771 853 5634
Fax  +44 (0)1904 432673

The American Dialect Society -

More information about the Ads-l mailing list