Articles

The Importance Of National Accreditation When Choosing An MBA Program

2010-02-22

One often hears schools refer to themselves as accredited. What does this term mean? Why is it important for you to receive your MBA from an accredited MBA program?

Accreditation is a quality-control process for institutions of higher learning. When a school has been accredited, students and employers know its program has been monitored according to certain standards by an independent body, which has declared it to provide a reasonable education to those who attend the program. Accreditation is especially important to look for in countries, such as the United States, which do not require that a school be accredited to award its students diplomas. Many unscrupulous "schools" have sprung up, offering to give an MBA degree or a degree in some other program to those who pay a fee and do very little learning. These places are called "diploma mills." Needless to say, students do not get much benefit from them. One can receive a business degree without learning the first thing about the skills required to succeed in business. Employers will likely not be fooled by job applicants who pad their resumes with such "degrees," and in fact may conclude they don't want anyone who would try such a thing working for them. Ultimately, the student is the real victim of the diploma mill's scam. Are all schools without accreditation diploma mills? Perhaps not. Perhaps it is possible to receive a quality education from an unaccredited school. But that is too big a risk for a responsible student to take, when accreditation offers an easy way to ensure a school is legitimate.

By making sure you only attend a school which has been accredited by a recognized accrediting body, you can avoid falling into traps and receiving potentially irreparable damage to your professional reputation. There are two types of accreditation in the United States: national and regional. Regional accreditation mostly judges academic, non-profit colleges and universities; most other schools seek national accreditation. Most distance-learning MBA programs, for instance, will be nationally accredited. There is one other thing to be aware of when searching for an MBA school with accreditation: just as there are "diploma mills," there are now "accreditation mills" offering cheap-and-easy accreditation to schools that do not deserve it. So make sure that you check not only that a school is accredited, but also that the accrediting institution is recognized by a legitimate authority. In the United States, that would mean either the Department of Education or the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.

In conclusion, you cannot go wrong by choosing an accredited institution. Through national accreditation MBA programs will be guaranteed to meet certain standards of excellence and prepare their students for the challenges of the business world.