What You Need to Know About Accreditation
When choosing a college online, accreditation is one of the most important factors to consider. While you may understand this already, you might not know exactly why accreditation is so important or what it means for your degree. Here are the basic ins and outs of accreditation for online universities so you will know how to identify a quality degree program.
The Types of Accreditation
There are two types of accreditation: institutional and programmatic. They each have different implications for you degree program.
You always want to ensure that your college has institutional accreditation. Institutional means that the entire school has been evaluated—all the departments, the teaching staff, and the curriculum. Only if the whole college meets these quality standards would it receive institutional accreditation.
There are two types of institutional accreditation: national and regional accreditation. This simply refers to the area where the accreditation agency awards its certification. Regional accreditation agencies only look at schools in a particular geographical region of the United States, say the South or the Northeast. National accreditation agencies look at schools across the nation; as you can imagine, many online schools have national accreditation, since they are not restricted to any particular geographical region. You can check the Department of Education’s database to see if any particular school is an accredited online college. (ed.gov)
Programmatic accreditation is the other type of accreditation, and it’s a bit different than institutional accreditation. Instead of being awarded to an entire school, it is given to a particular program or school within a college. Depending on your degree program, it may or may not be important for your program to have this other accreditation.
For example, accreditation by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business is definitely helpful for people pursuing any sort of business program. Nurses have to attend programs accredited by their state nursing boards, if they want to sit for the national nursing examination. You can check the education section of the Bureau of Labor Statistics webpage for your desired career, to see if there are any programmatic accreditations that could be important for your online degree. (ed.gov)
Avoiding Diploma Mills
Looking for accredited online schools is the first step to avoiding diploma mills. There are a few other things you can look forever, however, that can tip you off to a bogus school. (ed.gov)
Watch out for schools with these characteristics:
- The school is accredited by an unusually long and impressive list of accrediting bodies—make sure you double check to see that they are valid.
- Its address is a P.O. box or suite number.
- Degrees can be earned in very short amounts of time.
- It offers a “deal” when you enroll in multiple degree programs.
- It charges by the degree, not the credit hour.