Accreditation of an academic unit by an accrediting body is an evaluation process which leads to a public statement about the extent to which the unit meets official educational quality standards.

Accreditation provides an educational institution or a program with a credential. The credential is most often a public statement that the academic unit satisfies a set of quality criteria established by the accrediting body. Through the accreditation process, the faculty, the facilities, the student body, budgets, recruiting practices, admissions procedures, course content, and other pertinent issues come under thorough review.

The accreditation process may operate at a broad or narrow scope:

Institutional: the evaluation of an entire school, college, or university
Programmatic: the evaluation of just one degree-granting program within a larger institution

The academic unit is often an academic institution or a degree-granting academic program within the institution. The standards, which are established by experts in the field, cover elements such as the quality and size of the faculty, facilities, budgets, recruiting practices, admissions procedures, course content, and the degree to which the unit reviews its operations periodically and uses feedback from constituencies to improve operations.

The main constituencies of the accreditation process are the general public, students and prospective students, employers, industry, academic institutions and their faculty and staff, and governmental bodies.

The public statement on the degree to which the unit meets educational standards serves as a credential. The credential can be used by the constituencies of the program to assess the quality of the unit and to guide its future development. The process of accreditation also serves to foster self-examination by academic institutions; to develop a dialog between constituents of institutions and programs on content, methods, and outcomes; and to encourage continuous improvement. Accreditation often plays a role in decisions about enrollment in schools, hiring of employment seekers, and licensing of professionals by governmental bodies.

Accreditation of a program is sometimes used as an indicator that graduates of the program received education that qualifies them to be employed as professionals at a certain level (e.g., entry level) or to become candidates for a professional license.

The degree to which accreditation is voluntary varies from place to place. There are some countries and jurisdictions where accreditation of academic units is considered voluntary; in other countries academic programs that are not accredited by recognized accrediting bodies face serious legal restrictions. Even systems that assert “voluntary” accreditation sometimes provide strong disincentives to unaccredited programs, to the extent that the process is voluntary in name only.

This website describes the accreditation process, and provides information on methods, objectives and challenges to accreditation, as it is practiced at present around the world. The section does not mean to present or assess any particular method or accrediting body, and veterans of specific accreditation processes may therefore find that their individual experience was different than the general methodology described here.

Additional Research
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