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Copyright 2007 - On Purpose Publishing Company This article has been made freely available at CollegeWin.com. This article may be freely shared, posted or published provided no charge is made for its redistribution, it is not altered in any way and the redistribution includes this copyright and redistribution rights notice. You may also freely link to this article as posted on our website. For any other uses of this material you must request approval via the Contact Us page at CollegeWin.com Accreditation ExplainedYou will often see references to whether or not a particular college is accredited. What does that mean? The concept of accreditation is simple enough. A college or university seeks recognition from an accrediting body by applying for accreditation. The accrediting body typically has some published minimum standards that a college or university is expected to meet in order to receive accreditation, and the school will provide documentation showing that they have met these standards. Some accrediting bodies then grant provisional or interim accreditation pending a full accreditation review. Other accrediting bodies don’t grant provisional accreditation but wait until a review has been conducted and then if the findings of the review team are favorable they grant accreditation. This seems clear until you ask who can grant accreditation. Many people assume that accreditation is granted by the Federal government, but that simply isn’t the case. Instead, there are numerous organizations which have been formed to accredit colleges and universities. The most widely sought after and accepted accreditation is granted by one of the regional accrediting organizations recognized by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. A college or university accredited by one of these organizations has met a standard that will be recognized and accepted by other universities, government agencies and employers nation wide. No college is required to apply for accreditation at all, and some colleges choose not to seek accreditation because they disagree with the standards of the accrediting bodies. So why should you care whether or not a college you are considering attending is regionally accredited? There are several significant advantages to attending a regionally accredited school. First, the accreditation review process is ongoing, so accredited schools need to revisit how well they are doing with the accrediting organization every few years. This regular review helps to focus their attention on ways to more effectively carry out their educational mission and on measuring whether or not they are actually producing the results they set out to produce. The Six Regional Accrediting Organizations- Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools
- New England Association of Schools and Colleges
- North Central Association of Colleges and Schools
- Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities
- Southern Association of Colleges and Schools
- Western Association of Schools and Colleges
Second, regionally accredited colleges are more likely to accept transfer credits from other regionally accredited colleges, and to accept graduation from a regionally accredited college as a prerequisite for attending graduate school. If you go to a college that is not regionally accredited and later choose to transfer or apply to graduate school you may find your prior efforts won’t get you credit at your new school. Third, regional accreditation provides a basic level of legitimacy for your college degree. From time to time you will see news stories about a teacher, politician, corporate executive or civil servant who had been employed on the basis of a degree that was later shown to be from an unaccredited college. Even when the person holding the degree says they knew the school wasn’t accredited but they pursued the degree for personal or professional development reasons there is often a suspicion that the person holding the degree from an unaccredited college somehow cheated. This is not an entirely fair characterization, since it is certainly possible to get a great education at an unaccredited school, but if you are hoping to trade on the credential value of your diploma you should probably think very carefully about earning it at a school that is not regionally accredited. Professional association accreditation: In addition to regional accreditation, many colleges or particular programs within colleges also are accredited by professional associations. Engineering programs are accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). Business programs are accredited by the Association of Collegiate Business Schools and Programs (ACBSP) and by The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). Nursing programs are accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE) and the National League for Nursing Accrediting Commission (NLNAC). There are dozens of legitimate and nationally recognized professional accrediting organizations.
Sometimes these professional accreditations mean that a graduate of an accredited program is qualified to pursue a professional license. Sometimes the professional accreditation simply means the college or program wanted to be recognized as meeting the highest standards for education in the field and sought voluntary accreditation in order to demonstrate the quality of their programs. If you are seeking to join a particular profession by way of a college education you should make an effort to find out if there is an accrediting body that evaluates these professional degree programs and then get the list of accredited programs to help you find an appropriate college. Keep in mind that professional association accreditation is usually pursued in addition to rather than instead of regional accreditation, so if you find that a college on the professional accreditation list that is not on the appropriate regional accreditation list you should think carefully about whether a degree from that school will get you where you want to go after college. If you find that most or all of the colleges on a professional accreditation list are not regionally accredited you should read the next section of this chapter. Unrecognized accreditation associations: Unfortunately the issue of accreditation has been made more confusing because degree mill operators and other higher education con artists have tried to assume the mantle of accreditation without earning that status. They do this by forming a new accrediting body and granting accreditation to their own college and the colleges run by their fellow con artists. So you may see the website for Bogus University offering you the chance to earn a "fully accredited" degree. On reading further you may learn that they are accredited by the Online Association of Overly Innovative Colleges and Universities (OAOICU). They may even have gone so far as to incorporate OAOICU and set up a website where you can check for colleges which are OAOICU accredited. That website may explain that the regional associations of colleges and universities don’t offer accreditation to online programs (not true since many of the largest online universities are regionally accredited) or that the standards of the regional associations are geared toward traditional degree programs and may not be appropriate for the unique educational methods of the colleges accredited by OAOICU. This claim is potentially true (see the next section of this chapter), but if the college is touting itself as "fully accredited" and then it turns out they aren’t regionally accredited you should be very cautious. You can investigate accreditation claims very easily by going to a site created by the U.S. Department of Education: www.ope.ed.gov/accreditation This site contains a database of 6900 educational institutions and programs that have been granted accreditation by one of the six regional accrediting organizations, one of the 54 national accrediting organizations recognized by the Department of Education or any of the state higher education approval agencies recognized by the Federal Department of Education. Another way in which unaccredited colleges try to imply that they are accredited is to declare that they are recognized or chartered by some particular state. This essentially amounts to a claim that they incorporated as a school in that state. If a college is trying to imply that state recognition confers the same level of legitimacy as regional accreditation take everything else they tell you about their wonderful college with a big grain of salt. Is an unaccredited college ever legitimate? There are legitimate reasons why a college may not choose to seek regional accreditation. The most common reason is that certain Bible Colleges do not want to conform to a secular vision of what constitutes a college education. These colleges may be accredited by one of a number of organizations that evaluate Christian colleges such as the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (TRACS) or the Association of Independent Christian Colleges and Seminaries (IACCS) but not seek regional accreditation. Does that mean they are as good as the colleges that do seek regional accreditation? It is difficult to make such a blanket comparison. It could be that some of these colleges would find it difficult to meet regional accreditation standards, but it may well be the case that if they were interested they could easily win regional accreditation and simply chose not to do so. These religious accreditation associations are certainly not all just the fabrication of con artists, and the schools that earn this accreditation have had to demonstrate that they meet reasonable standards for curriculum, quality of faculty, library resources and financial management just like a college pursuing regional accreditation. If you are considering a religious education it may well be that you care less about recognition by a regional accrediting body and more about the ministerial careers of recent graduates, so for your purposes the religious accreditation association might actually provide a better reference than would regional accreditation. Still, if you think there is a chance you may choose to transfer before completing your four year degree you should probably favor a school that has both regional and religious accreditations over one that lacks regional accreditation. Beware degree mills: While on the subject of college credentials let me offer you one last word of caution. There are higher education con artists who try to sell prospective college students on easy shortcuts to a college degree. Before giving your money to an outfit that offers to give you a degree based on your life experience please consider the following fundamental law of education: There is no such thing as an easy excellent education. There are easy educations. There are excellent educations. But the excellent educations are not easy. Why can I confidently assert that there is no easy path to an excellent education? Because the purpose of education is to turn you into a more capable, more powerful person than you were before you were educated. Imagine instead that your goal is to be a more physically powerful individual. Would you believe someone who told you she could give you a piece of paper that said you could life three times your body weight based on your life experience? Would you believe someone that told you that instead of bench pressing 100 pounds of weight for thirty reps every other day for a month he could give you the exact same strength improvement result and you would only have to bench press 50 pounds for ten reps every other day for a week? Of course you wouldn’t believe it because that doesn’t make any sense. To improve your physical strength you have to push yourself to toward the limits of what you can do, and you have to do that consistently over a period of time. So if you want to make yourself more powerful in terms of your ability to understand more about the world and to solve harder problems you need to put yourself in a program that challenges you consistently over a period of time. Keeping this principle in mind is one of the best ways of making sure you get more than your moneys worth out of your college choice. And keeping this in mind will make you impervious to the pitches of the higher education con artists. |
