美国university中的college,school and department都是指什么？

All above me are wrong.

In USA, there are many colleges. Lots of them are famous with reputation equivalent to Stanford. These colleges focus on liberal education, not research. Their goal is to train graduates with generic training and potentials to grow and develop for life. Of course, ther are many wide chicken colleges.

A university is usually bigger in scale and offers both teaching and research.

A college in a university is a collection of departments or programs, under a particular theme not classified under the tradition of, for example, faculty of science. For instance, the Holy Cross College in a university may offer religion, philosophy, sociology and psychology, from a Christian perspective.

A school in a university is like a faculty, but much larger in scale. Usually, the university names their biggest faculties as schools and provide more funding. You can tell which department or faculty receives more attention and