Are national college credits better than regional credits?

Answer 1

There is no fundamental difference between the two forms of accreditations. Both are conducted by non-profit associations established by consent of a group of institutions. Both accreditations are based on the principle of voluntary application by an institution, both are institution-wide in scope, and both use peer reviews to judge whether an institution meets published standards of academic quality and institutional integrity.

DETC enjoys the precisely same national recognitions as the regional bodies do, and DETC has the same kind of accreditation standards which address curriculum quality, faculty qualifications, student services, and ethical and business practices.

There are some interesting differences: DETC is expert in distance learning technique and specializes in accrediting distance education instruction. It has over a half century of experience in doing this. DETC evaluates institutions completely every five years, while regional accreditation is conducted once each decade. Between five-year reviews, DETC does a comprehensive subject specialist curriculum evaluation of every new program before students may enroll, while the regional associations do not.

But at the core, the accreditations are very similar, and both are virtually identical in philosophy and scope of activity. To term one more acceptable or better than another is not at all accurate.

Will the credits a student receives from a DETC-accredited institution be accepted by a traditional college or university? What dictates this?

There is never any guarantee any accrediting association can offer that a student's credits will transfer to another institution. This is because each institution reserves the right to make its own decisions on which credits to accept and which to refuse. Sometimes, a regionally accredited college will reject DETC institution credits based on the fact that the institution where the credits were earned is not regionally accredited.

The fact that some regionally accredited colleges refuse to accept credits from another school solely because it is not regionally accredited flies directly in the face of national policies advocated by American Council on Education (ACE), the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO), Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), et al. The real issue here has less to do with the academic quality of the sending institution, and more to do with anti-competitive business practices of the receiving institution. Competition is heating up in higher education, and there are forces at work to control the inroads being made by "upstart" operators. Congress, the Department of Education, and the Department of Justice have been looking into this anti-competitive practice by higher education, and we suspect we will see significant activity in the coming months on this matter.

I know first-hand the quality and the rigor of the academic degree programs of the DETC institutions. Each DETC institution program is evaluated by several professors who teach at regionally accredited institutions. These professors are asked to respond to over 200 questions about the programs they are evaluating. There is no question that at the end of this process, the DETC program is comparable to the quality and rigor of a similar program offered by a RA college.

So, when you look at the reasons provided by a college for rejecting DETC credits, "That it is not offered by a regionally accredited institution," the reasons boil down to prejudice, ignorance or anti-competitiveness. Or better put, it is the result that the receiving institution person simply does not accept DETC accreditation as being legitimate, despite what the Secretary of Education or CHEA has decided.

The challenge DETC graduates face in transferring credits is to convince the receiving institution that their academic work is truly legitimate. I am happy to say that of the DETC graduates who try to transfer their credits, about 70 percent are successful today. This percentage will continue to increase as the hundreds of thousands of DETC institution alumni are able to convince skeptics that DETC accreditation is a "real" accreditation, and that people can place their faith in it.

More details read an excellent article by Accreditation Guru by Michael Lambert posted on this website; http://www.military-advanced-education.com/article.cfm?DocID=2040

Lastly, Congress doesn't believe one is better than the other. See HEAAmendment2007 that congress passed prohibiting regional accredited schools from this form of discrimination.