The purpose of the current study was to describe how the prospective teachers conceive the university phenomenon through taking a qualitative perspective. In this study, the tendencies of the prospective teachers’ conceptual, perceptual or metaphorical reasoning about the phenomenon of university were tried to be portrayed. This study was a basic qualitative research. The participants of the study were 689 prospective teachers who were randomly selected from a total of a population of 1984 individuals enrolled in nine teaching programs of an education faculty affiliated to a foundation university in Istanbul. Qualitatively oriented data were gathered through the metaphor composition task completed by the participants. The appropriate metaphorical reasoning of the participants were analysed and 14 main themes and 25 sub-themes were abstracted. In general, participants perceived the university as intellectually oriented consumption and production units. Recommendations were offered for Turkish higher education system.