Vocational Universities

A vocational school, providing vocational education and also sometimes referred to as a trade school or career college, is a school operated for the express purpose of giving its students the skills needed to perform a certain job or jobs. 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.

A Vocational university, (or Professional university or University of applied sciences or University of Applied Arts or College of Higher Vocational Studies, etc.), is an institution of higher education and sometime research, which provides both tertiary and sometime quaternary education and grants academic degrees at all levels (bachelor, master, and sometime doctorate) in a variety of subjects. (More precisely a vocational university grants Professional degrees like Professional Bachelor's degree, Professional Master's degree and Professional doctorates).

The education which takes place at vocational universities combines teaching of both practical skills and theoretical expertise. Higher vocational education might be contrasted with education in a usually broader scientific field, which might concentrate on theory and abstract conceptual knowledge. This has to do with the fact, that in the Middle Ages, an educational institution was called a (medieval) university only if a certain classical canon of subjects was taught (including, of course, philosophy, medicine and theology). In modern times, other subjects, namely natural and engineering sciences became more important — but still, institutions of tertiary education focusing on these and not offering the classical canon were denied the prestigious denomination "university", so they had to use the general word (High School in English) Hochschule in German Haute Ecole in French (Belgium and Switzerland), Hogeschool in Dutch, Högskola in Swedish, etc.

There exist vocational universities of applied sciences (also named polytechnics or institute of technology), vocational universities of liberal arts, etc. In recent years many vocational universities get full university status, like the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, formerly Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Wien), the Örebro University, Sweden (formely Örebro Högskola), etc. There is also some establishments like institutes of technology which have full university status but continue to use there former name, like the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.