'College' first meant a legal club of colleagues, not a place to study
In ancient Rome a collegium could be a guild of priests, a board of magistrates or a trade association: people chosen to act together. That is why surgeons, heralds, cardinals and presidential electors all belong to 'colleges', and why the word can mean a high school in Paris and a university in Boston.
The root is Latin legere, to gather or pick, plus cum, with, so a college is literally a group selected together, and colleagues are people chosen to work side by side. Crucially, a Roman collegium was a corporate body, an artificial legal person able to sign contracts and to sue or be sued. Medieval England had colleges of priests serving chantry chapels. Eton College, founded in 1440 by letters patent of Henry VI, was set up as a body of fellows, priests, choristers, poor scholars and old poor men, charged with teaching grammar free of charge.
That corporate sense survives outside education: the College of Arms enforces heraldic law, the Royal College of Surgeons grew out of a London surgeons' guild, and the College of Cardinals elects popes. Professional bodies such as the Royal College of Nursing and the American College of Surgeons keep the name.
In schooling the word's meaning shifts almost everywhere. In France, Belgium and Switzerland it refers to secondary schools. English sixth form colleges teach 16 to 19-year-olds, the equivalent of India's and Singapore's junior colleges. Canadians draw a sharp line between going to university for a degree and going to college for technical training, and Quebec routes students through CEGEPs before university. Several Canadian cities call academic high schools 'collegiates' to dodge the post-secondary connotation, a naming habit that began because they taught Latin while vocational schools taught trades.
In the United States 'college' usually means any degree-granting institution. It can be a liberal arts school like Amherst, an undergraduate division like Yale College, a two-year community college or, rarely, a full research university such as Dartmouth. Collegiate universities such as Cambridge or Toronto contain constituent colleges with their own endowments, while the university grants the degrees.
Source: College
