Accreditation Discrimination
For several years, federal policy makers have been battling intensely over whether colleges discriminate in their transfer of credit policies against students from institutions that are accredited not by one of the six regional accrediting agencies, but instead by what are known as "national" accreditors. National accreditors focus on specific types of institutions rather than on colleges in a region, and by and large they are newer and less established than the regional accreditors.
In that skirmishing, most of the attention focuses on for-profit colleges, both because a majority of the national accrediting agencies focus on for-profit career-related colleges and because those institutions are growing and politically muscular. But several of the national accreditors work with faith-based institutions, and they, too, complain that their students sometimes face discrimination when they try to transfer their academic work because the receiving colleges say they accept credit only from regionally accredited institutions.
Being accredited by an agency that is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education is essential if a college wants its students to qualify for federal financial aid, as the government provides grants and loans only to students at such institutions. The federal government grants recognition to accreditors using a process in which a federal panel reviews their work every five years and makes recommendations to the education secretary, who rules thumbs up or down. Both types of accreditors, national and regional (and a third category, programmatic, but that's a story for another day) earn their recognition through the very same process, using the same standards. [Inside Higher Ed]
