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Comment by simonbarker87 | Hacker News Reader

I’m going to be pedantic but he’s not a college student in the UK, he’s a university student in the UK. College is where UK students study from 16 to 18. He’s 20 studying at Durham University.

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Most UK universities consists of colleges [1], and you study at one of them. Durham is one of the ones that has colleges [2].

He is this both studying at Durham University and in a college.

While you're right the terms are usually used the way you point out in British English, and it would have been unusual for a British article to describe him as a college student because it'd be misleading, if being pedantic the language used is technically correct even when used in the UK. Certainly when writing American English in a US publication about the UK.

[1] Not all, as far as I know. E.g. I don't think LSE or Kings or any of the other former University of London colleges that are now full universities in their own right have their own colleges (they're still part of University of London, but gained the right to apply for university status in 2018) but I might be wrong about that.

[2] https://www.studentgoodguide.com/apply-to-university/best-du...

No, very few universities in Britain are structured in this way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colleges_within_universities_i...

In any case the fact remains that the person in question goes to one of the ones with colleges. It's in any case largely moot to how a US publication describes him, and that was a tongue in cheek way of making the point that if you're going to pick and choose which part of the context you care about, that goes both ways.

I did start to write an answer, and in checking my answer realised that a link I’d have to link to an article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colleges_within_universities_i...

I was wondering if there could be colleges in Federated colleges, but that’s daft.

I think Kent was going to be called Canterbury, but there was already a Canterbury University in New Zealand.

Lancaster, Kent, and York sounds a bit Shakespearean.

Now I’m thinking is there a University of Atreides?

Literally no UK university student would call themselves a college student, regardless of the few UK universities that structure themselves into colleges. I, and everyone of my university friends stopped saying we were in college when we left college (at 18) and instead said we were in uni. Every uni grad I know talks about “when I was at university” and not “when I was in college”.

The article is talking about a student in the UK, it should use the correct terminology for that country and not the US specific one.

Like I said, I’m being pedantic.

He was not writing about himself. He was being written about by a US publication using American English, and it's a perfectly valid choice for a US publication to use American English rather than British English.

Except that this isn’t the original headline and was provided by the HN submitter.

That just changes who is to "blame", and the submitter appears to be American, based on the link in his profile, so it also makes no difference to the original issue.

I don't know, if an American newspaper writes that a British minister went to "public school", wouldn't that be misleading?

A lot of universities have "schools" too e.g. business school. But we wouldn't call them school students either..

I was being snarky in response to a pedantic response that was itself founded on conveniently ignoring that the article was written in a US publication using American English. As such, if they were called school students in American English, and someone chose to ignore that and complain about how it was called something else in British English, I might have been tempted to make that same argument in that situation.

The point more that if one person can apply "pedantry" with disregard for convention and context, then so can I.

Except the US publication doesn't. They call him:

> Kacper Surdy, a 20-year-old economics student at Durham University

Only the HN submission uses the phrase 'college student'.

While still then still changes nothing - the submitter is American according to their website.

...which is also a long way from London! :)

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