What are the names of the universally recognized university accreditation standards for
business (National Business Education Accreditation Council (NBEAC)
languages (Commission on English Language Program Accreditation
Commission on Massage Therapy Accreditation)
engineering (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)
science (National Accrediting Agency for Clinical Laboratory Sciences (NAACLS))
I must confess I am somewhat muddled upon reading your OP and your reply to it. At some personal risk (this being the General Questions forum) I feel compelled to inquire as to whether or not your reply to your OP answered all of the questions you posed in your OP.
I do note a rather extraneous appearing outlier in your reply of a list of accrediting organizations which is occupying the precise middle - the Commission on Massage Therapy Accreditation. Being as familiar with myself and my proclivities as I am, I am going to have to select this for my criterion. I am somewhat embarrassed to divulge that you may find my bias in this regard to be the equal of the newspapers you were so kind as to mention.
I believe I selected the correct accreditations below. But if someone has more experience in this area I’d like to hear from him/her.
List - Wikipedia…_organizations
business (National Business Education Accreditation Council (NBEAC)
languages (Commission on English Language Program Accreditation
Commission on Massage Therapy Accreditation)
engineering (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)
science (National Accrediting Agency for Clinical Laboratory Sciences (NAACLS))
The regional accreditation boards take care of most fields in the US. They accredit colleges (among others). They review all degree granting programs at the college so each department is included by default. If you are studying a standard Liberal Arts, Science, Social Science field, that’s all you want or need in almost all cases.
There are specialized accreditation for some fields. Engineering is the biggest one with individual accreditation. And those are Really Important.
Some fields do have accreditation but a lot of places ignore them since they are not worth the hassle. The ACM accreditation program for Computer Science, for example, is not well respected and many departments don’t bother with it. (Ex-CS prof, so I’ve been there, hated that.)
The US Dept. of Educ. has a long list of valid accrediting bodies. Many of them quite skeevy. This is why those “schools” that are just student loan sinks stay in business.
Note that having a regional accreditation isn’t always a guarantee. Some of the student loan scam places have bought out a failing real college with accreditation and assumed that accreditation for the whole place.
(Getting regional accreditation is a big hassle. Keeping it is fairly simple. But one place I worked botched that and had to start over. It was a big stink.)
For schools of business, the AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) is better thought of than the one you linked to, at least for 4 year and master’s granting institutions. But the school itself still has to be accredited, as ftg said. For example, the university where I work is accredited by SACSoverall, but programs within the university may then be accredited by other organizations, like the AACSB.
It will vary by specific programs and not all degree programs have national accreditation. In the sciences, applied programs like Clinical lab sciences, medical imaging, nursing etc can be accredited.
Basic sciences, such as a bio degree, won’t be.
However the university as a whole will be regionally accredited (which is more relevant than national accreditation) indicating that all theIr academic programs meet minimum acceptable standards.
" Engineering is the biggest one with individual accreditation. And those are Really Important."
ftg, Can you suggest some important accreditations for post-graduate engineers?
"The NAE is a member of the National Academies, which includes the NAE, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the Institute of Medicine (IOM), and the National Research Council (NRC) – which serves as the principal operating arm of the academies. Engineering program activities of the National Academies cut across the many operational units of these four organizations, although most projects are executed by units of the NRC.
The NAE has more than 2,000 peer-elected members and foreign associates, senior professionals in business, academia, and government who are among the world’s most accomplished engineers. They provide the leadership and expertise for numerous projects focused on the relationships between engineering, technology, and the quality of life."
You’re asking two questions here:
(1) What are the names of the accreditation bodies for these four subjects?
(2) What are the best criteria for choosing a university?
These are two different questions, and they don’t really overlap very much, so let me break it down. My area of exertise is in engineering, so I will concentrate on that.
(1) What is the name of the accreditation body for engineering?
As you suspected, ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) is the organization that accredits engineering programs in the US. Essentially, any undergraduate engineering program in the US of note is accredited by (or has plans to gain accreditation from) ABET. Additional points:
(2) What are the best criteria for choosing a university?
Again speaking about engineering, the real answer is: it depends on what criteria are important to you, and the subject you want to study. In general, the programs with the best reputation attract the best faculty and the best students, who go on to have great careers, which enhance the program’s reputation, so they can attract the best faculty and the best students.
In other words, in the absence of any specific wants from you, the most general ranking is by reputation, which is by definition subjective. Off the top of my head, I would say that of US engineering schools, the most prestigious is MIT, followed by (in no particular order) Cal Tech, Stanford, Michigan, Illinois, Cal Berkeley, and Georgia Tech. You might throw Purdue, Cornell, Virginia Tech, or Carnegie Mellon into the mix also.
This, of course, is US-centric, and ignores the to-notch Eropean universities.
(a) There really aren’t any; at least, in the form that you can use to choose a program. (b) Why do you want to know?
The NAE is not an accrediting body. Your link just has a headcount of NAE members working at various universities. That’s an attempt to make an objective ranking of engineering programs, but a really narrow one, and one that aso refelctes the size of the college.
“Although ABET can and does accredit graduate-level programs, this is far from the norm, and most graduate-level engineering programs are not accredited by ABET.”
Thanks zut. This is what I was after. When it comes to Ivy League and long-standing top-ranked universities, accreditation is never really questioned. What prompted my question was the accreditation of lower tier but good universities and colleges, whose reputation may not be that well known.
ABET for engineering
SACS/AACSB/ACBSP for Business /EMBA programs
NAACLS for Science
Language (Linguistics) Not sure which accreditation standards are the best in this field