A university is a large educational institution where students go after finishing high school to study advanced subjects and earn degrees. Unlike elementary or high school, where you learn many subjects each day, university students focus deeply on particular fields: medicine, engineering, history, art, computer science, or hundreds of other possibilities.

Universities typically have multiple colleges or schools within them, each specializing in different areas. Stanford University, for example, has schools of engineering, medicine, business, and law, among others. Students spend several years at university, usually earning a bachelor's degree first (which takes about four years), and sometimes continuing for advanced degrees like master's or doctoral degrees.

Medieval universities like Oxford and Bologna were founded nearly 1,000 years ago and still exist today.

Universities differ from colleges, though Americans often use the words interchangeably. Technically, a college focuses on undergraduate education, while a university includes both undergraduate and graduate programs and conducts research. When someone says they're “going to college,” they might actually mean a university, or they might attend a smaller college that focuses just on bachelor's degrees.