Nationally Accredited Online Colleges
What is Accreditation?
Accreditation is a kind of quality assurance process whereby operations and services offered in an educational institution are evaluated to ensure set standards are met. In other words, it ensures the basic level of quality in the education that you get from an educational institution. Equally, it ensures that the degrees conferred to you will be acknowledged for their true achievements.
Purpose for Accreditation
- Give public confidence in a school
- Ensure educational institutions become accountable
- Challenges institutions to improve their quality of education
- Uses specific standards of assessment and evaluation to guarantee quality education
Difference between National and Regional Accreditation
Nationally Accredited Online Colleges are those that have been accredited by one of the 52 recognized national accrediting bodies. A nationally accredited online college means it has been accredited using polices used to accredit other worldwide or nationwide institutions. Generally, nationally accredited Online Colleges are accredited for their post-secondary programs which are either technical, vocational and career in nature.
Unlike Nationally accredited online colleges, a regional accredited online college is one accredited by one of the six recognized regional accreditors who accredit elementary schools, middle schools, junior high schools, and public and private schools of higher learning that are academic in nature. It’s therefore right to say that nationally accredited online colleges are mostly for profit while regionally accredited online schools are mostly non-profit academically-oriented institutions.
Diploma Mills and Accreditation Mills
Unlike regionally or nationally accredited online colleges, diploma mill are organizations that confer diplomas with no or substandard academic study without acknowledgement by official accrediting bodies. Accreditation Mills on the other hand are just like diploma mills where a school attains accreditation from a low standard independent group or worse still the school sets its own independent board and accredits itself.
As a learner who wishes to attend nationally accredited online colleges, you have to be wary of such substandard accrediting bodies. You can find out whether an institution is truly accredited or not by visiting the official website of the Council for Higher Education accreditation (CHEA).
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