You’ve found the online program you want, all you to do is click, pay, and you are in! Is it too good to be true? Well, yes. You can end up not getting the education you paid for, credits that are not transferable, or course work that is not accepted by professional organizations. The best way to make sure you aren’t falling for a scam is to make sure the online provider is accredited.

Accreditation Comes First

If you are looking to earn a bachelors degree in economics and then plan to get an MBA, accreditation is essential. It gives you some degree of assurance about the organization, regardless of whether it is a distance education provider or a face-to-face institution. Nonetheless, just knowing if an online program is accredited is still not enough. Anyone can set up an organization and call itself an accrediting agency. It is not that common, but diploma mills have been known to create their own accrediting agency and then declare they have accreditation.

Just What Is Accreditation?

The Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) defines accreditation as "review of the quality of higher education institutions and programs." Within CHEA, private, nongovernmental educational agencies with a regional or national scope have adopted standards for evaluating colleges and universities. Institutions seeking accreditation conduct an in-depth self-study to measure their performance against these standards. The accrediting agency then conducts an on-site evaluation and either awards accreditation or pre-accreditation status or denies accreditation. Periodically, the agency reevaluates each institution to make sure continued accreditation is warranted. Accreditation is not a one-step process. An institution must maintain high standards or face jeopardizing its accreditation status as a result of these periodic evaluations.

Seeking accreditation is entirely voluntary. The initial accreditation process can take as many as five or ten years and it costs money. For that reason, recently established online program providers that are perfectly legitimate may not have been in operation long enough to be accredited.

Who Does the Accrediting?

Accrediting agencies are private, nongovernmental organizations. In other countries, government agencies oversee educational quality. In the United States, authority over postsecondary educational institutions is decentralized. Although there are some national accrediting agencies, each state, not the federal government, regulates educational institutions within its borders and, as a consequence, standards and quality vary considerably.

There are two basic types of accreditation: institutional accreditation and specialized accreditation. Institutional accreditation is awarded to an institution by one of six regional accrediting agencies, such as the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools, and national accrediting agencies, such as the Distance Education and Training Council.

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