A college degree is, to many extents, both a social and professional certificate of achievement. It represents at minimum several years of dedication and in many cases decades of it. In life, it proves you are capable of learning, and professionally, it proves you are willing to. A college degree is by no means a measure of a person's character, but it can be highly indicative of that person's resolve and commitment to goals.
This correlation between college degrees and learning, commitment, and everyday life is one that has grown more significant each year as more and more students earn collegiate degrees. But it's important to understand where the significance originates. Without some kind of standard in place that offers a measurable quality recognition system, a college degree would simply be another piece of meaningless paper.
The standard comes courtesy of the United States Department of Education. It's called accreditation and it represents exactly the standard just mentioned.
The expressly stated goal of accreditation is to ensure that institutions issuing college degrees are held to the same principles across the board, for the sake of quality education. By creating this standard, there is a communal understanding that colleges with this recognition either meet or exceed "quality" criteria year after year.
There are two primary kinds of accreditation in the United States: national and regional. Each serves its own distinct purpose. While neither is superior to the other, it's important to understand that regional accreditation and nation accreditation each carry their own set of criteria. This can be slightly problematic for students trying to transfer between regionally and nationally accredited schools. This is just one reason why research is an important component to transferring schools.
Regional accreditation is aptly organized by geographic region. There are six divisions in the country, each responsible for their own group of states. These councils oversee public and private institutions throughout the country. These six are the only governing bodies that can issue regional accreditation to any college. They are all recognized by the Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.
National accreditation is slightly different in that it is not segregated regionally, but rather by specific interest. A council for distance education, for example, would accredit colleges that offer distance education. These national accreditation agencies exist to offer the same standard regional accreditation offers, but to an exclusive kind of institution. Often these institutions offer teaching modes or methodologies that are not as "typical" as the schools in regional accreditation programs, and so the national accreditation offers them their own recognition standard.
Choosing between national and regional accreditation is not a decision most college students face. This is probably because the advantages to each are not comparable to each other. Students seeking specialized schools with national accreditation for their college degrees will likely not care that it is not regionally accredited, since it offers the program the student is looking for, and vice versa. Whichever college path you choose, traditional or through online colleges, know that accreditation is important, in either form. It serves as a regulator of sorts, promising and delivering to students the quality education they pay for.
