We are familiar with such universities, and we often see their names in various university rankings. Well-known Ivy League schools, such as Harbin, Yale, Pope, Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell, and top universities such as Princeton, Stanford, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and well-known public universities such as UCB, Virginia, Chapel Hill, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Champaign, Illinois, are all comprehensive universities.
A comprehensive university is characterized by its large scale and complete professional settings: it offers a variety of degrees, such as undergraduate, master's and doctor's degrees, and the general colleges of arts and sciences, engineering, business, medicine and law school are fully set up. In addition, comprehensive universities have many opportunities, activities, societies and rich lives.
Category II: College of Arts and Sciences.
Small but refined (minority, elite), the number is about 300-2000, basically providing four-year undergraduate education, without postgraduate degree. Of course, with the development of some schools, some liberal arts colleges began to offer a few graduate degrees gradually, but the number was very small. The idea of education is to advise students to learn basic knowledge with interest in undergraduate course, teach in small classes, and pay attention to cultivating students' comprehensive ability and personal quality (speech and expression ability, team coordination ability, writing ability), so that professors can teach undergraduates well and lay a very solid foundation for engineering and business. The number of students is small, so that students can get familiar with each other and accumulate contacts. The specialty setting is not as comprehensive as that of comprehensive universities, and most of them are located in small towns and are relatively remote. Williams, Amherst, Smith, Brynmor, Mount Holyoake, Swarthmore, Middlebury, Trinity College, Colgate, etc. These are all colleges of arts and sciences.
For the application of comprehensive universities, there are fewer students from China in the College of Arts and Sciences. The popularity of general liberal arts colleges in China is not as high as that of comprehensive universities, so fewer people choose them. However, with the deepening of parents and students' understanding of American liberal arts colleges, more and more people choose liberal arts colleges that represent American elite undergraduate education.
The third category: professional schools
Professional fields, such as the Rhode Island School of Design, the world's top art school, Rhode Island and the Ivy League school Brown University live next door. The two schools also cooperate, and RISD students can choose courses at Brown University for free. Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design also cooperate to offer dual-degree courses. Another example is the Berkeley Conservatory of Music and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music. There are also buildings, such as the Southern California Institute of Architecture, which ranks among the top ten undergraduate buildings in the United States. This kind of school is mainly aimed at students with strong professionalism.
The fourth category: community colleges.
Community colleges in the United States are two-year programs that offer associate degrees: unlike our colleges, after graduating from community colleges in the United States, as long as the GPA meets certain requirements, you can transfer to a four-year university to continue your undergraduate studies. Many community colleges have signed legally binding transfer agreements with well-known comprehensive universities around them. For example, in California's community colleges, many students transfer to various branches of the University of California every year. Low tuition and low admission requirements are two remarkable characteristics of community colleges: therefore, many students from poor families in the United States choose to attend community colleges; There are also some students who choose to go to community colleges first because of poor learning conditions and apply to universities for less than four years. Relatively speaking, few children from China go to the United States to attend community colleges.
In addition, American universities can be divided into public universities and private universities according to the different sources of running funds. Comprehensive universities include private universities and public universities.