Why Should I Look For College Accreditation?
If you’re considering going back to school, you’ve probably heard a lot of schools talk about being “fully accredited.” What does this mean? What do you need to know? Here’s a quick and easy guide to accreditation and why it’s important.
What is College Accreditation?
Accreditation is the process by which quality control is assured in education. In the U.S., colleges and universities are not directly regulated by the US Department of Education.
Instead, a set of non-profit accrediting associations ensure quality based on peer review: in order to be accredited, a school must be evaluated by a panel of independent experts (often faculty from other schools) and deemed to be of comparable quality to similar universities all over the country.
To put it simply: if a school or program is accredited, you can rest assured that it has been judged by an independent evaluator to provide a quality education.
Regional Accreditation
In many cases, this is considered the most important form of accreditation. There are six regional accreditation agencies in the US, each responsible for a particular geographic area.
These organizations regulate nearly all educational levels, from grade school all the way through graduate programs. They are considered the most rigorous and important form of accreditation, in particular because of their relationship with Federal funding: in order for a student to receive Federal financial aid, he or she must attend a regionally accredited school.
Because of this link to financial aid, regional accreditation can be a crucial issue for prospective students. For more information, including a searchable database of regionally accredited schools, check out the Council for Higher Education Accreditation website: http://www.chea.org/Directories/regional.asp.
Programmatic Accreditation
This slightly more complicated type of accreditation is tied to specific programs. Degrees in certain fields are accredited not by school, but by particular degree program. Perhaps the most famous programmatic accreditors are the professional licensing bodies, including institutions like the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association, which regulate medical and law programs nationwide.
There’s a little wrinkle here that you should keep in mind: professional licenses like Teaching Certifications are often granted not by schools, but by these regulating associations. Programmatic accreditors, then, function not only in the peer review of individual programs, but also in the issuing of professional licenses.
Graduating from an accredited institution, however, does not necessarily mean that you will be a licensed professional in a given field. Many professions (for example, teaching) require graduates to pass exams before they are considered licensed or credentialed.
What Accreditation Means to Employers and Other Schools
If a school or program is accredited, its degrees are officially considered equivalent to the degrees offered at thousands of other schools. Similarly, degrees from accredited schools and programs are held to be proof of training in a specific field, proof that is recognized by employers all over the country.
This is especially important because it means that any accredited educational program, whether its online, part-time, or both, is considered the same as its full-time, campus-based counterpart at the same or any other college or university. For example, a regionally-accredited online program in Business has undergone the same rigorous evaluation as a campus-based program at another university.
Degrees from individual schools will of course still vary in rigor, cost, and marketability, but the accreditation system is designed to provide employers and schools a measure of accountability. If you are a prospective student, accreditation allows you to focus on finding a program that meets your individual needs, with the assurance that a quality baseline has been met.
The Bottom Line
All of this can seem very confusing, but it shouldn’t be. You don’t have to sweat the details, and you don’t need to become an expert on higher education. What you do need to do, though, is take a little extra time and check up on a prospective degree program before you enroll.
Whether you are looking into an undergraduate degree or graduate degree, make sure you do your homework: to reiterate, make sure that any program you choose has at least one of the two forms of accreditation listed above.
If a particular program doesn’t offer proof of legitimate accreditation – and most will – look somewhere else. Knowing your school or program is rigorous and respected will take a huge load of your mind, and free up space for what really matters – hitting the books!
