Colleges

College (Latin: collegium) is a term most often used today in the United States to denote a degree-awarding tertiary educational institution and in other English-speaking countries to refer to an academically oriented secondary school. More broadly, it can be the name of any group of colleagues, for example, an electoral college, a College of Arms or the College of Cardinals. Originally, it meant a group of persons living together, under a common set of rules (con- = "together" + leg- = "law" or lego = "I choose"); indeed, some colleges call their members "fellows". The precise usage of the term varies among the English-speaking countries. In the United States and Ireland, for example, the terms "college" and "university" may be regarded as loosely interchangeable, whereas in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and other Commonwealth countries, a "college" is usually an institution between school and university level (although constituent schools within universities are sometimes known as "colleges").

History
See also: History of education
Educational institutions in the form of a school or academy have existed in many civilizations. The earliest were in Mesopotamia during the 3rd millennium BC. In Sparta, the Agoge was the name for an educational institution. Its origins are thought to be between the 7th and 6th century BC, for both men and women. Rome followed around the 3rd century BC with their rhetoric schools. Ancient China also had Shuyuan academies, while ancient India had Gurukul schools.

The origin of the college, as distinct from a school or academy, arose with the madrasah of the medieval Islamic world. The madrasah was an Islamic college of law and theology, usually affiliated with a mosque, and is funded by a charitable trust known as Waqf, the origin of the trust law.[1] The internal organization of the first European colleges was borrowed from the earlier madrasahs, being funded by trusts and featuring a system of fellows and scholars, with the Latin term for fellow, socius, being a direct translation of the Arabic term for fellow, sahib.[2]

While philosophy and the rational sciences were often excluded from a madrasah's curriculum,[3] this varied among different institutions, with some only choosing to teach the "religious sciences", and others teaching both the religious and the "rational sciences", usually logic, mathematics and philosophy. Some madrasahs further extended their curriculum to history, politics, ethics, music, metaphysics, medicine, astronomy and chemistry.