Vocational school
A Vocational School is one operated for the express purpose of giving its students the skills needed to perform a certain job or jobs. It is usually a post-secondary school, but in some instances may take the place of the final years of high school. Vocational schools do not exist to further education in the sense of liberal arts, but rather to teach primarily or only job-specific skills, and as such are better considered to be institutions devoted to training, not education.
Vocational skills may be public schools and as such operated by a government, school district or other officially-sanctioned group, in which case they may or may not charge tuition. Most purely vocational schools are private schools; within this group they may be further subdivided into non-profit schools and proprietary schools, operated for the economic benefit of their owners. For a long time many proprietary vocational schools had a poor reputation for quality in many instances, and for overpromising what the job prospects for their graduates would actually be; this has been largely corrected by more stringent regulation.
