As Joshua Ray Walker might ask, “What even is this?” The first few links are from a decade and a half after REM and others started making lovely music that we called “college” at the time before it got lumped into alternative. Genre names tend to be decided by publishers, not fans, thus Billboard’s slow move to “R&B” once they realized “race records” was a little too on the nose. Any genre not deemed “pop(ular)” by publishers tended to be for a certain “special interest”, country, soul, race, college. There is power in having a name for things and knowing there are others out there like you, especially in the days when that statement only came from distant FM bands.