When you are searching for a college, you will of course be concerned about its accreditation. Accreditation is a voluntary process whereby a college will allow an accrediting agency to come in and inspect the school’s processes in delivering an education. The accrediting agency sets standards and measures the college against them. Here are some facts about accreditations you should know before choosing a college to get your degree:

Know the difference between national and regional accreditation. Regional accreditation institutions have been around for quite some time. Most of your major state and Ivy League private schools are accredited by a regional institution. In most cases, when you take college courses at one institution with regional credentials, the credits will transfer without any problem to another institution with the same credentials. The six regional accrediting institutions of colleges and schools are: 1) North Central Association, 2) Middle States Association, 3) Southern Association, 4) New England Association, 5) Northwest Association, and 6) Western Association.

There are numerous national accreditation associations. You can be reasonably certain that if a school is selling a degree program, it will say it has these credentials. And it will even list the name of their credentialing association. Most would not pay for a degree program otherwise. However the national associations you want to give the most weight to are those listed as recognized by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). You can find a listing of those associations at: http://www.chea.org/pdf/CHEA_USDE_AllAccred.pdf .

Transferability of credits can be a problem with long-reaching consequences. For example, if you get your associate’s degree at an institution not recognized by a regional credentialing institution, you would have to start from the very beginning if you transferred to a college that was. The same would hold true if you are pursuing a master’s degree.

Your employer might check the accreditation of your college degree. This is usually only important when you are applying and interviewing for a new job. Usually, your employer has many resumes and only one job available. He or she may use where you went to school as determining factor when there is a tie between you and another candidate.

Extremely low-priced tuition should be an alert. The biggest reason why someone would sign up for a degree program that has weak credentials would be price. You can’t make price the only determining factor however if a course of study is much lower priced than competing schools, it should alert you that something is not right.

Accreditation can affect the availability of federal tuition assistance. For example, you may want to draw educational benefits from a military G.I. Bill and not be able to qualify because the institution is not recognized by a valid credentialing agency. And the same holds true with many student loans, grants, and federal educational financial aid programs.

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