Online College Accreditation Basics

Degrees from online institutions can cost thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of work. To ensure you are not wasting your time or money, it is crucial that you research a school's credentials before deciding to attend one program over another. If you do not thoroughly research an online school before attending, you might find out too late that your degree is not recognized by certain employers or other universities. In order to eliminate valueless online schools, you must find out whether or not said schools are accredited.

What is Accreditation?

Accreditation is the process whereby federal and state governments, as well as private agencies, verify that programs at schools across the country meet the standards established by the academic community. Accreditation comes in two forms, institutional and programmatic.

• Institutional accreditation looks at the school as a whole, and is typically awarded by one of six main regional accrediting agencies or a national agency. This is valuable in determining the quality of the overall institution, but it does not take into consideration the quality of the various programs a student may participate in.
• Programmatic accreditation, on the other hand, is a process performed by any number of smaller agencies that evaluate the quality of education within a particular field. This type of accreditation can be applied to an entire university department or just a specific curriculum within a course of study. If a specific program is accredited by a programmatic agency, it is considered to be a high quality program, regardless of whether or not its parent institution is accredited by an institutional agency.
• This website, maintained by the U.S. Department of Education, lists the many legitimate accrediting agencies.

Most academically adequate online colleges hold institutional accreditation from one of the six main regional agencies (Western, Northwest, Southern, North Central, New England, and Middle States), or from one of several national agencies. If an online school does not possess institutional accreditation from one of these entities, a student should think twice about attending that online school unless he or she would be enrolled in a specific program that has been individually accredited.

The Dept. of Education also maintains a list of all accredited schools in the United States, which can be accessed here.

Why is Accreditation Important?

For the public, accreditation is vital to identifying whether an online school is legitimate. Unlike Harvard University, Yale University, and all of the other large universities of the world, most online schools have yet to establish reputations and centers of academic excellence. Therefore, without accreditation there would be no way of knowing whether or not a school's claims of validity are true or false, because it would be impossible to verify them.

Attending an accredited online school can produce certain benefits along with peace of mind. For example, if a student decides to transfer from an accredited online school to another institution, there is a least a chance that some of the student's credits earned will transfer with them. This is not guaranteed, but there is a much higher probability of it happening than if the student transferred from a non-accredited school.

Furthermore, if a graduate of an accredited online university applies to another school in order to continue his or her education, or to a job which requires a specific degree, the graduate can be certain that his or her credentials will be accepted. On the other hand, if a graduate from a non-accredited university attempts the same thing, there is a significant chance that his or her coursework will be rejected because the new school or employer cannot verify the legitimacy of his or her education.

A degree from an accredited online institution will provide benefits for the rest of the graduate's life. Accreditation legitimizes a school and validates the coursework done by its students. On the other hand, institutions without accreditation lack the credentials to be viewed as acceptable by prospective employers or educational institutions and should be avoided.

Article Resources:

U.S. Department of Education Database of Accredited Postsecondary Institutions and Programs
U.S. Department of Education: Accreditation in the U.S.
U.S. Department of Education: Overview of Accreditation
U.S. Department of Education: Regional and National Institutional Accrediting Agencies