Do you share lecturers among colleges, or is there one college that all computer science majors attend?
The analogy usually used for the benefit of American-tourists (not meant patronisingly, it's just empirically surprisingly effective) is that it's like Hogwarts. You have the colleges/houses (like gryffindor and hufflepuff) where you live (at least in 1st year) and eat and play sports for, but lectures and the degree in general (like potions class) are all done in faculties with people doing the same course but in other colleges.
Most lecturers and professors will belong to a college too, but they'll still be lecturers in a faculty rather than a college. In Cambridge there is an academic rank called 'College Lecturer' but like most things that doesn't mean what it says, and is probably designed to confuse and intimidate foreign people, like everything else (for example May Week when all the college balls are held after exams, is in June, and the weeks start on Thursday and end on Wednesday). [Lest the po-faced take me seriously, it's not actually designed to confuse people, it's just there's a lot of vestigial baggage that it's not worth the effort of changing [like removing an appaendix when it's not causing you problems] when you've been around almost a millennium and where a switch to the Gregorian Calendar was more recent than when the desk in your study was built.]
And the colleges are more than semi-automonus - they have their own academics, own money, and they do their own admissions.