We used to have fairly rigid split between three main paths - university, community college, or no higher education at all, for the students coming out of the vocational tracks in high school (at most they might take a '13th grade' year in their HS). Lately university and community college are becoming increasingly linked and easier to combine.

I only really know the universities, which are probably more like German ones than American ones, though with some differences - the calendar looks somewhat different, and it's not common to study at several different universities like it is in Germany. Possibly also because we only have a handful of universities to begin with - for most fields of study at the university level you really only have two or three serious choices in Dutch and about as many in French. A couple come to mind where you have precisely one option, unless you choose to study either abroad or inside Belgium but in the other language. Which does create a somewhat different atmosphere - our universities inevitably are large institutions without much differences between them in terms of student population, and especially freshman classes can easily contain hundreds of students.