Random College Generator

How this random college generator works

Press Generate and you get an institution and its country. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.

Harvard. Stanford. MIT. Oxford. Cambridge. Caltech. Princeton. Yale. Imperial. Chicago. ETH Zurich. Berkeley.

Every one of them will probably still be here in four hundred years, and that is a much stranger claim than it sounds.

Universities outlive almost everything

Think about the institutions you would bet on. A government. A bank. A church. An army. A currency. A company.

Now think about how many of them, in any country you like, have existed continuously for five hundred years, doing recognisably the same job, under something like the same name.

Almost none.

Kings who actually ruled: gone. Feudal lords with vassals: gone. Guilds holding monopolies over a trade: gone. The great trading companies: gone. Most currencies, most parliaments, most borders, most armies, most banks.

The university just kept teaching.

Eighty-five survivors, and seventy of them teach

Clark Kerr was an economist and the president of the University of California, and in The Uses of the University he made an observation that has been quoted ever since.

By his count, roughly eighty-five institutions established in the Western world by 1520 still exist today in recognisable form, doing similar work, with unbroken histories.

The list of what survived is short enough to write out. The Catholic Church. The parliaments of the Isle of Man, of Iceland, and of Great Britain. Several Swiss cantons.

And about seventy universities.

Five hundred years of plague, revolution, reformation, world war, empire, collapse and redrawn borders, and the things that came through it were a church, three parliaments, a handful of cantons, and a great many lecture halls.

The next time a university announces a strategic transformation, remember that the institution has already outlasted the Holy Roman Empire.

College and university are not the same word

They are used interchangeably and they should not be, and the confusion runs along a national border.

In American usage, college often means the whole undergraduate institution, and "going to college" and "going to university" mean the same thing. A college may also be a division inside a university: the College of Engineering, the College of Arts and Sciences.

In British usage a college is more often a part of something. Oxford and Cambridge are federations of self-governing colleges, and a student belongs to one of them first and the university second. Elsewhere in Britain a college is frequently a school for older teenagers, and nothing to do with degrees at all.

Then there are the ones that kept the word by accident. Imperial College London and King's College London held on to "College" from their founding and grew into universities without changing the sign.

The word records history rather than describing structure. Which is why the University of Maryland, College Park, is not a college at all. College Park is the name of a town.

A ranking is not a sample

Read the opening list again. Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, Caltech, Princeton, Yale.

That is not a cross-section of the world's higher education. It is the top of a global league table, and league tables measure something specific.

They weigh research output, citation counts, and reputation surveys conducted largely in English. American and British universities are funded to do very well on all three. So roughly half the names near the top of any such table are American, and that is a real measurement of a real thing. It is not a measurement of where learning happens.

Notice who is not near the top. Bologna, founded in 1088 and usually called the oldest university in the European tradition. Salamanca. The Sorbonne. Heidelberg. Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, often cited as the oldest existing degree-granting institution anywhere.

The oldest universities on Earth are middling entries in a table that rewards citations. Which tells you what the table is for, and what it is not for.

Ways people actually use this

• Quizzes. Show the institution, ask for the country. Then ask which century it was founded in and watch the guesses come in four hundred years late.
• Worldbuilding. If your world has a university, it is older than your world's government. Act accordingly.
• Writing prompts. Every institution here has a founding argument, a schism, and a building somebody regrets.
• Teaching about rankings. Hand somebody the results and ask them what the ordering measures. Then ask them where Bologna is.
• Choosing what to read tonight. ETH Zurich and Caltech have histories worth an evening.

Getting more out of the filters

• Entries read "Name - Country", so Contains works as a country filter. Try USA, United Kingdom, Australia.
• Type University and look at what stays behind. Type College and read the results carefully, because one of them is a town.
• Type Institute or Technology to find the ones that never called themselves universities at all.
• Starts with and Ends with compare a single character. Give them one letter.

Questions people ask

What is the oldest university in the world?

It depends on what you count. Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez is often cited as the oldest existing degree-granting institution. Bologna, founded in 1088, is usually called the oldest university in the European tradition.

Are universities really that long-lived?

Yes. Clark Kerr counted about eighty-five institutions founded in the Western world by 1520 that still exist in recognisable form. Around seventy of them are universities. The rest are the Catholic Church, three parliaments and some Swiss cantons.

What is the difference between a college and a university?

In the United States the words are often interchangeable for the whole institution. In Britain a college is usually a constituent part of a university, or a separate school for older teenagers. Some universities simply kept the older word in their names.

What do university rankings actually measure?

Research output, citation counts and reputation surveys, mostly conducted in English. They are a genuine measurement of research prestige. They are not a measurement of teaching, of access, or of age.

Why are so many top-ranked universities American?

Because league tables weigh research output, citation counts and reputation surveys conducted largely in English, and American universities are funded to do very well on all three. It is a real measurement of a real thing, and a narrow one.

References

1. The University's Never-Ending Crisis, The Hedgehog Review
2. Labaree, Understanding the Rise of American Higher Education
3. Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University