User:Choster/Workspace

Merge both to Category:Academic units of universities and colleges. The distinctions that BrownHairedGirl are largely true, but #1 is far from universal. The University of New South Wales and University of Mumbai among others have schools and faculties which call themselves "colleges"; Harvard University calls Harvard College a "school" and converted Radcliffe College to an "institute"; Cornell University's 7 "colleges" and 6 "schools" are indistinguishable in terms of administration, instruction, funding, dates of establishment, student services, etc. but to keep things interesting it not long ago retired a "division" and changed another "division" to a "faculty." The point being we shouldn't simply expand category names to include all possible variations. "Cities" categories became "Cities and towns" and then "Cities, towns, and villages," but are now being converted to "Settlements" categories instead of "Cities, towns, townships, boroughs, districts, villages, hamlets, departments, and Census-designated places." I should remind editors that the "universities and colleges" formulation is itself a compromise term for all tertiary and quaternary educational institutions— different from "universities" which would seem to exclude institutions like liberal arts colleges, but placing it before "colleges" (in contravention to the usual U.S. usage of "college and university") to signify that the colleges in question are postsecondary. Of course, still no one likes it, because it's still ambiguous to those in countries where "college" commonly indicates a secondary school, while sounding unbelievably unnatural to those most familiar with the U.S. educational system, but the leap from "universities and colleges" to "postsecondary educational institutions" or "institutions of higher education" needs to be made at a different time. No, as with settlements, I think we would best step back and remember that we aren't trying to categorize things of the same name, but things of the same idea, and here the idea are academic sub-units of institutions of higher education. I might draw a distinction between a school/college/institute/faculty which can confer degrees and a department/faculty which is part of the degree-granting unit, which would be most directly comparable with one another, except we have cases where there are inter-school units which are administratively independent of the schools, but which enroll no students of their own (e.g. the aforementioned former Division of Biological Sciences at Cornell, whose students received degrees from their respective schools, not from the division)— but perhaps those cases are rare and could be double-listed without serious issue. The structure would also imply [[:Category:Research units of