Unlike universities and even junior and community colleges, business colleges typically train the student for a specific vocational aspect, usually clerical tasks such as typing, stenography or simple bookkeeping.
They served as a trade school for both business and necessary skills, from shipbuilding to sewing.
[1] The goal of a business college is not to provide a thorough education, as is the model of modern universities in the liberal arts fields, but rather to provide training for a very specific task, such as legal terms, marketing, strategy, planning, Human resources, management information systems, finance, or negotiation.
Academic credits earned at a business college do not transfer to other colleges or universities and students cannot earn a bachelor's degree, though an associate degree may be offered.
In recent decades the number of these institutions has been declining as business colleges have been finding more competition coming from community colleges, which provide both vocational as well as liberal arts classes and are often able to offer the classes at a lower rate of tuition, as they are usually nonprofit and subsidized by one or more levels of government assistance.