See Arizona State University as an example. Overall it is a University but under Organization and Administration you can see the university is split into parts either called “School of X” or “College of X”.
American usage of these terms has little to do with OSM definitions of these tags
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The main point is everyone uses it differently and British English much like American English does not follow consensus on this especially in the modern era. The line separating a college from university on either side of the pond is not so clear cut. My reply was to try and share a standard that may apply to many scenarios but as I stated will not apply to all and no one will be 100% satisfied with whatever resolution comes out of this.
Now we just need people from 195 other countries to contribute to this thread by sharing a standard based on how the words are used where they live?
Not productive. Let’s try and propose ideas how to address the apparent tagging confusion instead. OSM works on consensus not necessarily perfectly matching any one system. As we’ve seen the systems themselves don’t follow a standard so we as OSM contributors can come to a consensus on defining what these tags mean and what differentiates them from each other.
I feel your suggestion mixes two meanings of college - as a “sub unit” of a university, and as a further education institute in its own right. I think amenity=college in OSM has generally been used in the latter sense, whereas your suggestion emphasises the former. That leads the proposal very far from current OSM practice in suggesting that an institute covering the range from bachelor to postdoc would be tagged as a college. I think most such places as currently tagged as university.
Many universities call their constituent elements “schools”, but we don’t tag these as amenity=school. So if other universities call their constituent elements “colleges”, that doesn’t mean we should tag them amenity=college.
As an example, Trinity College Dublin (TCD) is the only constituent college of the University of Dublin. Contrary to your suggestion, it is the University of Dublin that awards degrees, not TCD. In practice few people ever need to talk about the University of Dublin. TCD is the physical location where people study for degrees and do research, so it makes sense that it is tagged as a university in OSM.
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It was only a matter of time before this would become a critique of American academia. 
“College” has multiple meanings in the U.S.:
-
The real-world distinction is more or less whether the institution offers graduate degrees. When an institution begins to offer doctoral studies, they’ll usually go through the trouble of renaming from “college” to “university”, even at the cost of name recognition. There are some notable exceptions, such as Boston College – there’s already a Boston University nearby. Nevertheless, this distinction so reliably aligns with the institution’s name that most American mappers use this rule of thumb when deciding between
amenity=collegeandamenity=university. So did the GNIS and MassGIS imports. -
A college or university is composed of multiple divisions that are variously named “colleges”, “schools”, “institutes”, or “centers”. By and large, mappers use
amenity=collegefor these POIs, sinceamenity=schoolis typically for primary and secondary education. The documented alternative isfaculty=*, but that’s merely a secondary key typically tagged on a building to indicate the subject taught there. Incidentally, Harvard College is part of a faculty of Harvard University, sofaculty=*is confusing too. I thinkamenity=collegewould be misused much less if there were some alternative primary tag to serve as a POI type in its own right. -
“College” is indeed shorthand for all higher education, but this is slang and everyone knows it isn’t how you distinguish between colleges and universities.
There are also multiple kinds of pre-university institutions:
-
Vocational schools, trade schools, and vo-tech schools are extensions of the secondary school system rather than part of higher education. Some are literally high schools. We’re generally tagging them as
amenity=school(sometimes withschool=vocational). -
Junior colleges, community colleges, and technical colleges offer two-year associate degrees with a career-oriented curriculum. Some students transfer to four-year colleges and universities. These are being tagged as
amenity=college. I don’t think it’s much of a problem that we’re conflating them with four-year undergraduate colleges.
While ideally we’d all use the same definitions universally, in reality it’s challenging because the American educational system is almost comically different than the British/Commonwealth system, frustrating even the experts as they conduct official international standardization efforts like ISCED.
Fortunately, we don’t have to achieve perfection in our school classifications. Users aren’t expecting to use OSM to decide where to enroll next. Most renderers equate amenity=college with amenity=university, making no distinction whatsoever. That leaves geocoders as the main consumers of this information. The ideal for a geocoder would be to label it according to its official designation, regardless of semantics. It’s sort of like the difference between place=state and place=province: obviously there is a difference, but how much does it really matter in the context of a map?
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Thanks - to be clear, “graduate degrees” means masters and PhD, correct? (What British English calls postgraduate degrees)
So American mappers use =university for institutions that offer masters and doctoral degrees and =college for the ones that don’t?
This isn’t too far off from the rule of thumb I suggested above, that’s based on the British distinction between HE and FE.
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This has also happened a lot in Ireland, where e.g. technical colleges expand their activities and eventually obtain university status, reflected in a change of name. This also requires legislation (at least where any kind of public funding is involved) - there is a whole series of legislative Acts recognising various universities. So I think in Ireland you could generally tag amenity=university based on the name, or by referring to government documentation, with similar results. It’s possible there could be some grey areas around institutions that are 100% privately funded.
I wonder if many other countries have similar official recognition for universities, so that for those countries something like “tag as a university if the government lists it as a university” might be a relatively easy guideline for those countries.
I have no idea if that is the case for Morocco, where this thread started.
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Traditionally, a liberal arts college was a college in the sense of only offering undergraduate education. Over time, to better compete with universities, many have expanded into (post)graduate studies, renaming themselves as universities in the process. But as a class, they are still known as liberal arts colleges or, colloquially, liberal arts schools. In other words, “University of X” can simultaneously be a university and a liberal arts college.
Maybe we should look from the opposite direction. “University” is commonly and currently described as “higher education”. If “higher education” includes undergraduate which includes Associates, and Bacehlors-only “colleges”, it should be changed to be defined by postgrad. Tag:amenity=university - OpenStreetMap Wiki
But then there is “a place for “further education” or “continuing education”: usually a post-secondary education institution which is not an institution of higher education”, or “A place for further education, a post-secondary education institution which is not a University”. They need to be fixed. Tag:amenity=college - OpenStreetMap Wiki
All of these terms are relative, shaped by national and regional laws as well as cultural norms. In the U.S., continuing education refers to university cooperative extension programs (operated by the likes of Harvard and the University of California), as well as some professional and adult education programs. These institutions are all very rarely mapped, so it’s hard to say what the tagging consensus would be. But I do know for certain that mainstream undergraduate colleges (four-year, granting bachelor’s degrees) and junior colleges (two-year, granting associate degrees) are all considered part of the higher education system, not part of a separate continuing education system, even if the curriculum may be more career-oriented than at a research university.
For better or worse, this is a country where colleges and universities, including the most elite universities, are ranked partly by the salaries their students make in industry after graduation. The way I see it, the descriptions on the wiki are clearly describing a different educational system, which is fine. American mappers and users generally are not confused about the difference between a college and a university, and it comes as no surprise that other countries do things a little differently. The wiki only needs to get into this level of detail for the benefit of countries that make no distinction between the two kinds of institutions. Otherwise, nitpicking about curricula is a distraction from mapmaking.
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