"Is it accredited?" This is likely the most asked -- and most misunderstood -- question regarding distance education. Even if the asker can't define accreditation, he knows, in some vague sense, that it relates to the usefulness of a degree. Education is an investment; if someone puts time and money into earning a degree, he wants it to be recognized, to help him reach his goals: in a word, to be useful. Unfortunately, because of the way the system works in the U.S., "accredited" and "useful" do not mean the same thing.
Part of what is misleading about accreditation is the word itself. It sounds so formal, official, definite. It's not. Unlike almost every other country in the world, where it is the government that decides what is and isn't a legitimate institution of higher education, the U.S. does not govern who is and isn't accredited, nor prescribe what degrees are or are not legitimate.
So, if not the government, who decides? Who passes judgment on the legitimacy of a degree? Quite simply, they are the gatekeepers of institutions that you compete to be a part of: namely, employers and people who make admissions or transfer decisions at universities.
Of course, employers and universities don't have the time and resources to monitor the quality of thousands of degree-granting institutions all over the world. And so accreditation has emerged as a tool to help human resource directors, admissions officers, and college registrars to make these decisions. They have come to trust certain accrediting agencies to tell them which schools meet an expected level of academic quality.
What makes this all so complicated is that there are dozens of accrediting agencies out there whose judgment is not trusted or recognized by most employers and universities. Anyone can set up an accrediting agency; any school can call themselves accredited. So rather than "Is it accredited?", a prospective student should be asking "Is this school accredited by an accrediting agency that is recognized and trusted by the people I need to recognize and trust it?"
Over time, the practices of employers and universities have become consistent enough where it is safe to make generalizations about accreditation standards. Guidelines such as GAAP, or Generally Accepted Accreditation Principles, are an attempt to describe the accreditation standards practiced by the academic and business communities in the U.S.
Every once in a while, though, it is important to check in with the arbiters of accreditation standards, to make sure that our generalized guidelines indeed reflect what's going on in human resource departments and registrar offices. So I recently interviewed officials at several respected distance-learning schools to get a feel for how they're responding to different kinds of accreditation.
I talked to Capella University, The Union Institute, Walden University, Thomas Edison State College, Excelsior College, Charter Oak State College, and Strayer University. I asked them about regional accreditation and national accreditation. While I was at it I asked them how they treat degrees from foreign schools and unaccredited domestic schools.
Next page | Regional and national accreditation
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