University
or College?

The full narration of the video.

Two great schools. One is called a university, the other just a college. The Central Conservatory of Music is among China's very best, yet the word "university" isn't in its name. So is a college a notch below a university?

No. The difference isn't quality. It's how wide the school spreads out. A university is like a big supermarket, a college like a specialty shop. The supermarket has fresh food, household goods, electronics. It sells everything.

The specialty shop sells one kind of thing, say, only instruments, but it does that one thing really well. Schools are split into zones like that too. Their real name is "discipline categories." Literature, science, engineering, medicine, law: each one is a big category.

In admission guides, the "Engineering" or "Literature" tag in front of a major: that's it. One zone of the store is one discipline category; each row of shelves inside is one major. So who decides which sign a school gets to hang?

China's Ministry of Education spells it out in a written rule. To be a university, a school needs at least three main categories. Each main category must hold at least fifteen percent of all students. No empty shelves just to fill the count.

More than eight thousand students in total, and at least five percent of them graduate students. And every main category needs at least two programs that can award a master's degree. To be a college, the bar is much lower: one main category, and more than five thousand students.

Music, art and sports schools can even be exempt from the headcount. So the Central Conservatory is a top-tier specialty shop. It's on the national list of 147 universities picked for top-level development, alongside the China Academy of Art, China Foreign Affairs University, and Peking Union Medical College.

"College" in the name means focused, not worse. Then why do we keep hearing about colleges renaming themselves universities? Because the bigger sign gets noticed. Many schools feel a university title makes it easier to attract students and teachers.

But a school can't just hang the sign itself. It has to build out the categories and enroll enough students, then get the Ministry's approval. One more thing people mix up: universities have colleges inside them, too. Take Peking University's Guanghua School of Management. It's a zone inside the supermarket, not a separate shop.

So when you size up a school, don't stop at the last word of its name. Look at which category it's strongest in. How many times has your old school changed its name?