Guest Author - Sanita Salter

The most important thing to consider in any type of training program is accreditation. This word will be the difference between going to school for nothing, the amount of respect commanded in the working field or with other schools should you try to continue in your choice of program to a higher level, and whether its worth the paper the certificate, diploma, or degree is typed, monogrammed, and certified on.

The US Department of Education provides information on accreditation and more specifically on distance learning. It includes accrediting agencies recognized by the department, which qualifies an institution to grant Federal Financial Aid to students. What it takes to become an accredited institution recognized by the US Department of Education is governed by the Secretary of Education and accrediting agencies.

Accrediting agencies are private educational associations. The agencies granting accreditation have standards, procedures, laws to abide by, application filing, recognition processes, review boards to pass, and recommendations to receive before the Secretary of Education who, has the final say on the agency’s recognition, can consider the recommendation for accreditation. And that’s for the agency that wants to grant schools membership not the actual schools. Whew! It sounds like a big deal. I knew it meant something and it was good but never how much went into the process of it all. I suppose that means that the agencies responsible for granting accreditation have a lot to risk by just randomly granting accreditation so you can probably safely bet that if a school is accredited by a nationally recognized agency has met some pretty high standards of quality.

There is also a database enlisted by the department of education, which allows for a quick search of which accrediting agency your school belongs to. It also includes some frequently asked questions such as “What do I do if I can’t find my school”. I looked up my school and found out what agency it was accredited by and when. I already knew it was accredited but verification is never a bad thing in my opinion.

One thing to remember is that nothing is guaranteed. Its not guaranteed at any college, in any career training program or other such entity that your satisfaction will be guaranteed. However, if it bears the “Accredited” stamp by an agency recognized by the US Department of Education you can probably guess it didn’t come easily.

http://ope.ed.gov/accreditation/index.aspx- Use this database as one source of information to search for your schools accreditation.

http://www.ed.gov/admins/finaid/accred/index.html- This is the link to the US Department of Education Accreditation section