In the US, a college offers only Associate and Undergraduate Degrees. A university offers advanced degrees, usually PhD’s although some only offer Graduate degrees.

Not all colleges or universities are accredited, although most are because students/parents expect them to hold accreditation. Checking accreditation is part of the college search process. Some agencies, such as the Middle States, are more demanding than others.

Universities generally offer at least a reasonable number of graduate degrees. Graduate degrees require research, so a university is expected generally to have a stronger research emphasis than a college. Some places you look will say that a university is a “collection of colleges” but that’s usually just an administrative setup designed to handle the large size of the place. Sometimes people assume that at a university more of the instructors will have doctorates. In fact, at the best liberal arts colleges, they have the highest number of instructors with PhD degrees on average (www.ctcl.com).

The difference between a college and a university is that a college just offers a collection of degrees in one specific area, while a university is a collection of colleges. When you go to a university you are going to be graduating from one of their colleges, such as the business college. As to which is better, it depends on what you want. Single colleges tend to be smaller while universities are bigger, but universities are better known.

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A university is a institution that offers academic degrees at all levels, bachelors, masters, PhD in a array of subjects. Some institutions only offer degrees in a certain field like business schools.

Accreditation is voluntary but most departments do it to show that their program is on par with regional or national standards. Some don’t because they believe it interferes with the philosophy of the school or department.

Ok I am not sure exactly how it works in the US, but without school accredition in Canada your dipmola is worthless. Also in Canada Colleges offer 1 year certifactes, 2 year dipomlas, and 3 year advances dipomlas. With some colleges they have partnerships with Unvieristies to offer BAs and universites and BA Masters and Doc

I took it from the page, not my words:

The difference between a college and a university is that a college just offers a collection of degrees in one specific area, while a university is a collection of colleges. The main difference between a college and a university is that the university maintains research requirements for its instructors and that the university is, in essence, a more research focused institution.

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And for my opinion, the university has to maintain a number of PhD professor while college can be run by the lecturer who got Master level.