Universities in North America

Universities in North America have an extensive history of being some of the leading educational institutions in the world. North American universities were originally modeled after universities in Europe but have developed different systems of their own.

“College” versus “university” terminology in USA

In the United States, the term college is frequently used to refer to stand-alone higher level education institutions that are not components of a university as well as to refer to components within a university. Stand-alone institutions that call themselves colleges are universities in the international sense of the term. Typically in the United States, a university is composed of an academically-diverse set of units called schools or colleges, whereas a college—whether it is a stand-alone institution of higher learning or a component within a university—typically focuses on one academic sector that is self-chosen by that institution, where that college is composed of departments within that sector. Note that the multiple colleges or schools comprising a university are typically collocated on the same university campus or near each other on adjacent campuses within the same metropolitan area. Unlike colleges versus universities in other portions of the world, a stand-alone college is truly stand-alone and is not part of a university is also not affiliated with an affiliating university.

Each institution may choose from several different schemes of organization using the terms, in most-macroscopic to most-microscopic order: university, college, school, division, department, and office. To illustrate the finer points of how these terms are used, consider four example institutions:
* Purdue University is composed of multiple colleges—among others, the College of Agriculture and the College of Engineering. Of these Purdue breaks the College of Agriculture down into departments, such as the Department Agronomy or the Department of Entomology, whereas Purdue breaks down the College of Engineering into schools, such as the School of Electrical Engineering, which enrolls more students than some of its colleges do. As is common in this scheme, Purdue categorizes both its undergraduate students (and faculty and programs) and its post-graduate students (and faculty and programs) via this scheme of decomposition.
* Compare this to Brown University, which is composed of one college (The College, which is for undergraduates) and two schools (the Graduate School, which is for post-graduate students, and the Medical School, which is for the preparation of medical doctors).
* Likewise, Dartmouth College is a stand-alone institution that names itself using the college term, but is organized similarly to Brown University with undergraduates enrolled in Dartmouth College (directly) and Dartmouth College containing three graduate schools that enroll the post-graduate students: the Tuck School of Business, the Thayer School of Engineering, and Dartmouth Medical School.
* Compare this to an entirely-undergraduate liberal-arts college that is a stand-alone institution, Carleton College, which is composed of only the college that contains departments for arts, languages, natural sciences, and physical sciences. Carleton is a pure example of a stand-alone college in the USA sense of the term “college”. Carleton confers no graduate degrees. Carleton has no schools that focus on a non-liberal-arts mission, such as a school of technology or engineering or nursing. Analogous to the Purdue University’s use of the term college, Carleton College is an academic sector composed of related departments that share a common liberal-arts philosophy of education. Analogous to the Brown and Dartmouth uses of the term college, Carleton College is entirely undergraduate.

In the Purdue University example, a college as a component of the university is a topical decomposition, focused on an academic sector of directly-related academic disciplines. In the Brown University example, a college as a component of the university focuses on the undergraduate mission. In the Dartmouth College example of a college as a stand-alone institution, a college focusing on the undergraduate mission is the prevailing but distinct identity of what is arguably a university when the collective of college and schools are considered. In the Carleton College example, the purest example of the USA's use of the term college is displayed in two ways:
* a homogeneous collection of academic-discipline departments that are unified under a common philosophy of education; and
* an undergraduate focus on four-year degrees.

History

A majority of universities started out as seminaries as part of missions to the new world. The Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, the oldest university in North America formed in 1538, is an example along with Université Laval, formed in 1663 in Canada. The precedent of founding universities out of seminaries is so strongly established in North America that even certain public universities were founded as seminaries, such as Indiana University which was founded in 1820 as State Seminary and had Protestant ministers as its presidents for its first six decades.

The oldest university in the United States of America is Harvard, which was formed in 1636 (although the College of William and Mary gained official university status first).

Lists by country

*List of universities in Canada
*List of colleges and universities in the United States
*List of universities in Mexico
*List of universities in Cuba