Accreditation Facts for Online Degrees

An online degree offers education in the convenience of your own home, but sometimes it's possible to overlook one of the most aspects of online school: accreditation. In order to get a good education that will lead to a rewarding career, it's imperative that your online degree program be accredited.
The accreditation process is an important one for colleges and universities. It's the means by which schools are put through a rigorous quality check to ensure that their academic programs are legitimate and solid, and that they're actually schools and not just online "diploma mills" selling degrees for profit. While accreditation isn't performed directly by the government, they do monitor it. The U.S. Department of Education, as well as the non-governmental Council for Higher Education Accreditation, keep track of accrediting agencies and which schools have passed muster, and their databases are invaluable tools in helping you weed through the online degree programs out there to find out which ones are really worth it. The bottom line is simple: Your online degree needs to come from an accredited outlet.
Those databases will help you sort through more than 7,000 schools and 18,000 degree programs recognized by the CHEA, Department of Education, or both. During this process, you'll come across different types of accreditation: regional and national. As you'd expect, one type of agency focuses on schools in a specific part of the country, while the other works with schools nationwide. There's a small caveat here, though. While there's no real educational difference between the two -- you'll be able to get a quality degree at both types of places -- it's typically easier to study with an online institution that's been regionally accredited as opposed to nationally. The primary reason for this is that it's usually easier to transfer credits among regionally accredited universities and from a regionally to a nationally approved school; if you want to change schools and go from a nationally to a regionally accredited one, it might be tougher to transfer some or all of your credits. It's something to consider if you envision needing or wanting to change schools or transfer course credits before you've completed earning your degree.
You should also investigate your degree plan before enrolling in an online institution to see if your eventual career requires any additional organizational accreditation. For instance, students studying to become surgical technicians need to find schools that have been accredited by groups like the Commission on Accreditation of Allied Health Education Programs and the Accrediting Bureau of Health Education Schools so they can take the career certification exam after graduation. This is an important extra step, though not every major requires this specific kind of accreditation. Check with your school's advisors to see if it affects you. No matter what or where you study, it needs to be accredited.