check Most people say that accreditation is one of the things that they want to see when choosing a school. Since it usually brings ease of credit transfer, acceptance by employers, recognition by various government authorities, and so forth, it offers many advantages. There can be good schools that are unaccredited, but the majority are not, and many are outright degree mills. Accreditation protects you from making that sort of mistake.

But while the conveniences that go along with accreditation are easy to describe, accreditation itself doesn't always mean what people think it means. For starters, accreditation doesn't magically bestow academic legitimacy on a school, it's simply an independent verification of the legitimacy that's already there. Now that's important, but it's not the same thing. And sometimes accreditors pay a lot of attention things that on the surface don't have anything to do with academic quality, like a school's finances. But that fiscal scrutiny serves a purpose, it's meant to ensure that a school that accepts students will be around long enough to see them to the end of their program.

Frequent readers know that my day job is working with distance learning at Virginia International University, a small university just outside Washington, D.C. that caters mainly to international students. While most of our students are on campus, we're trying to expand our online population as well. And as part of that, we have evaluators from our accreditor coming later this week to look us over and give our distance learning operation its regular checkup.

If you've ever been curious what it means for a school to be accredited, one thing I can tell you is that it requires a lot of actual work. It's not enough to be doing the right things, you have to be able to prove that you're doing those things. Details matter. Too many stones left unturned can lead to a bad evaluation, something no one wants. But while the sort of self-analysis is time consuming, it's for good reason. It leads to discoveries of small ways to improve, even if those improvements are to things that one is already doing reasonably well.

So while it's always a little nerve wracking to go under the microscope, it's for a good reason, and it leads to a higher quality of higher education that works for schools and works for students. After all, it's not just students who want the school they attend to be at its best, we who work in higher education want to do the best job that we can. Wish us luck!