Interesting tree/hierarchical data structure problem

Question

Colleges have different ways of organizing their departments. Some schools go School -> Term -> Department. Others have steps in between, with the longe

Answer 1

I suggest you better use a general table, called e.g. Entity which would contain id field and a self-referencing parent field.

Each relevant table would contain a field pointing to Entity's id (1:1). In a way each table would be a child of the Entity table.