"Educated at university" seems to be a British English expression. I wonder does it necessarily mean that someone "educated at university" or "educated at Oxford University" (for example)…
(a) necessarily graduated from/received a degree at the named university,
(b) can it only imply the person graduated from the named university,
(c) can it mean that the person studied there and left (either to another uniniversity or simply dropped out), without having graduated,
(d) can it mean a current "undergraduate" or "graduate" student (or their BrE equivalents) at said university?
Also, the expression can apparently be used for "University High School, Melbourne." Is this because the name of the high school begins with "university," or can the expression "educated at" apply to any high school? And whatever the case with high schools, I've the same 4 questions about a student "educated at high school" as I do above for "educated at university."
Best Answer
"Educated at university" isn't a special expression; at university is simply a spatial modifier showing where the education happened.
It's the same as saying something like "made in China" or "bought at the mall".
It implies it, unless further information has been given to suggest they didn't. He was educated at Oxford is taken to mean He has a degree from Oxford University. I suspect the assumption is that if you didn't complete your education or didn't pass your final exams, you don't count as being "educated" there.
Note what I said about "unless further information has been given to suggest they didn't". Context is everything, and you could of course say something like, He was educated at Oxford for the best part of a year before the stress got to him and he returned to driving taxis.
Like with a lot of other constructions, you can also deliberately mislead people: He was educated at Oxford could mean that he didn't get his degree, or that he got it from Oxford Brookes University (rather than The University of Oxford, which is the big prestigious one), or even just that he went to secondary school there.
The deception arises from the fact that you would be using the literal definition and the fact that the literal definition is not how the phrase is normally understood.
Answered these in part (a).
It would help if you provided a full sentence as your example, rather than just a phrase. If you say he was educated at UniversityName, you mean that his education there has finished.
You could theoretically say he is being educated at UniversityName to suggest an undergraduate. However, I'm not sure I've ever seen this phrase used in this way; it would tend to suggest something along the lines of corrective education (because of the passive tense - compare it to he is learning Subject at UniversityName) and so you'd be more likely to see it referring to primary or secondary education.
Postgraduate study tends to be even more self-taught so in you would be even less likely to see the passive phrase being used in that way. In my opinion saying "he was educated" to refer to postgrad study would be extremely unusual if not outright wrong.