In the United States liberal arts colleges provide education primarily at the undergraduate level. The term can also refer to schools which offer a vocational, business, engineering, or technical curriculum. The term can either refer to a self-contained institution that has no graduate studies or to the undergraduate school of a full university (i.e., that also has a separate graduate faculty).

In popular usage, the word "college" is the generic term for any post-secondary undergraduate education. Americans go to "college" after high school, regardless of whether the specific institution is formally a college or a university, and the word and its derivatives are the standard terms used to describe the institutions and experiences associated with American post-secondary undergraduate education.

Colleges vary in terms of size, degree, and length of stay. Two-year colleges, also known as junior or community colleges, usually offer an associate's degree, and four-year colleges usually offer a bachelor's degree. Often, these are entirely undergraduate institutions, although some have graduate school programs.

Four-year institutions in the U.S. that emphasize a liberal arts curriculum are known as liberal arts colleges; an example of a traditional liberal arts college is pictured to the right, Saint Anselm College. These schools have traditionally emphasized instruction at the undergraduate level, although advanced research may still occur at these institutions.

While there is no national standard in the United States, the term "university" primarily designates institutions that provide undergraduate and graduate education. A university typically has as its core and its largest internal division an undergraduate college teaching a liberal arts curriculum, also culminating in a bachelor's degree. What often distinguishes a university is having, in addition, one or more Graduate schools engaged in both teaching graduate classes and engaged in research. Often these would be called a School of Law or School of Medicine, (but may also be called a college of law, or a faculty of law, and so on.).

On the other hand, public and private universities are typically more research-oriented institutions which service both an undergraduate and graduate student body. Graduate programs may grant a Master of Arts or a variety of Master's degrees, including MBAs and MFAs. The doctorate is the highest academic degree in the United States, and the PhD is given in many fields. Medical schools award MDs or DOs while law schools award the JD. The extent to which graduate programs are integrated with undergraduate studies varies by university and by program. These institutions usually have a large student body. Introductory seminars on the undergraduate level can have a class size in the hundreds in some of the larger schools. Compared to liberal arts colleges, the interaction between students and full-time faculty can be limited and a higher number of undergraduate classes may be taught by graduate student TAs.[citation needed]

Some institutions, such as Dartmouth College, and The College of William & Mary, have retained the term "college" in their names for historical reasons or because of an undergraduate focus, although they offer higher degrees. And many colleges may offer a Master of Arts degree in some field without a full curriculum leading to a PhD. Some schools that were branded as a "College" have changed their names to "University" (Robert Morris University and Whitworth University being relatively recent examples), but often have to receive state approval before doing so, even if they are private schools. In one unique case, Boston College and Boston University, both located in Boston, Massachusetts, are completely separate institutions altogether.

Usage of the terms varies among the states, each of which operates its own institutions and licenses private ones. In 1996 for example, Georgia changed all of its four-year institutions previously designated as colleges to universities, and all of its vocational technology schools to technical colleges. (Previously, only the four-year research institutions, apart from the well-established historic exception of the Georgia Institute of Technology, were called "universities".) Other states have changed the names of individual colleges, many having started as a teachers' college or vocational school (such as an A&M — an agricultural and mechanical school) that ended up as a full-fledged state university.

"University" and "college" do not exhaust all possible titles for an American institution of higher education. Other options include "institute" (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), "academy" (United States Military Academy), "union" (Cooper Union), "conservatory" (New England Conservatory), and "school" (Juilliard School), although these titles are only for their official names. In colloquial use, they are still referred to as "college" when referring to their undergraduate studies.

The term college is also, as in the United Kingdom, used for a constituent semi-autonomous part of a larger university but generally organized on academic rather than residential lines. For example, at many institutions, the undergraduate portion of the university can be briefly referred to as the college (such as The College of the University of Chicago, Harvard College at Harvard, or Columbia College at Columbia) while at others, such as the University of California at Berkeley, each of the faculties may be called a "college" (the "college of engineering", the "college of nursing", and so forth). There exist other variants for historical reasons; for example, Duke University, which was called Trinity College until the 1920s, still calls its main undergraduate subdivision Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. Some American universities, such as Princeton, Rice, and Yale do have residential colleges along the lines of Oxford or Cambridge, but the name was clearly adopted in homage to the British system.[citation needed] Unlike the Oxbridge colleges, these residential colleges are not autonomous legal entities nor are they typically much involved in education itself, being primarily concerned with room, board, and social life. At the University of Michigan, University of California, San Diego and the University of California, Santa Cruz, however, each of the residential colleges do teach its own core writing courses and has its own distinctive set of graduation requirements.