Hi Giovanni!
(1) Community Colleges: A two year Associates Degree school which also offers both credit and non-credit courses for both post secondary and non-post-secondary students that must have at least a General Equivalency High School Diploma in order to be accepted along with being able to meet certain minimum aptitude standards which may differ from each state's own requirements. the post secondary courses lead to achieving an associates degree in the major students choose provided they take all of the required courses in order to satisfy the requirements for that specific course major, and some of the courses may not even be for example, welding related...
Some of the required courses may be required because the state education, or accreditation body requires the students to successfully complete those courses also in order to meet the minimum requirements for either the state education department, or the accreditation body to accept that the student has me thew requirements for either an Associates of Occupational Science(AOS), Associates of Applied Science(AAS), or an Associates of Specialized Technology (AST)... An AOS usually has the least minimum curriculum requirements to be met by the school, then the AST, followed by the AAS as being the Associates degree category requiring more difficult courses in the curriculum in order to meet it's requirements.
So the highest level Associates degree would be an AAS, followed by an AST, then the lowest being an AOS and usually the AAS has higher level math, English and other courses in order to meet the minimum requirements for issuance.
Now students can also enroll in courses that do not give credit hours as well as courses that do, but are taken in order to learn a skilled trade, arts and crafts kills, computers, certain languages courses, math courses, psychology, philosophy, etc. just because they are interested in them and want to know more about these skills or subjects on an introducory level, or to complete the necessary courses required in order to be eventually granted an associates degree of some type by completing what htey did not do earlier in their lives because of whatever reason, and as long as the credit they previously achieved will be accepted by the appropriate state education department or accreditation body if the school is a private school offering some, or all of the mentioned associate degree types.
Some community colleges offer courses where internships are granted to the student who achieve higher than average Grade Point Averages (GPA's), and can meet these requirements either at the start of their senior year, or after successfully completing their third semester with the minimum required GPA and have gained the confidence of their instructor that they will successfully complete such an internship. These internships offer the students real world exposure to working in their respective field of study in an entry level position so that when they complete their internship and graduate, they have an edge over the other students of what it's really like to be working in one of the many positions within their respective fields of study.
Finally some community colleges offer to the public, workforce development courses as well as specialized non-credit courses that do offer Continuing Education Units (CEU's) instead of credit hours that can be used in order ot achieve an associates degree... In other words, the CEU's do not count towards earning a degree, but do sometimes count towards maintaining a certification such as a CWI for example provided the courses have something to do related to the duties of being a CWI.
These courses may or may not lead to some sort of certification, yet they may also be designed in order to bring the student up to the level where the student would become prepared for certification... Also, some of these specialized courses are designed to meet the ever changing needs for local, or regional industries and businesses to remain diversified and competative gobally by providing courses to them so that they have a diverse, highly trained and talented pool of employees that are cross trained in various skills in order for the companies to successfully produce a wide variety of products and maintain, or achieve higher levels of quality simultaneously. So basically, that's how most community colleges operate and what they offer their respective communities in a nutshell... There's more, but if I continue to focus on community colleges, I will not cover vocational high schools or technical schools which are confusing enough to explain their differences as well as their similarities... So I'll end the explanation regarding community colleges now and move on to #2 Vocational High Schools.
(2) Vocational High Schools: I will edit later Giovanni! I'm not feeling too good today, so please bear with me, and I'll get back to you tomorrow hopefully.;)
Respectfully,
Henry