Accreditation is an incredibly important facet of Higher education. Most define accreditation as a status that shows that a Higher Institution has met and is maintaining a high level of standards set by an accrediting agency. However, accreditation is a voluntary evaluation process that institutions of higher education undergo in order to maintain standards of educational quality agreed upon by members of an accrediting body. Colleges and Universities are judged based on self-evaluations analyzing how well they meet these standards in the light of their missions. Accreditation seeks to assess and enhance the educational quality of an institution, ensure consistency in institutional operations, promote self-evaluation and institutional improvement, and provide for public accountability within a peer-review framework. Accreditation promotes institutional accountability by systematically and comprehensively evaluating institutions based upon criteria established via evaluation standard.

Accreditation assessments may include self-study on the part of the institution as well as evaluations by representatives of peer institutions who belong to the same accrediting agency. As a voluntary process, preparing an accreditation report can be labor-intensive. Most accreditors recommend that institutions start preparing their accreditation report about two years in advance of the due date. Despite the time commitment and the voluntary nature of the process, the vast majority of institutions choose to pursue and maintain their accreditation for two important reasons. Institutional accreditation is helpful when students want to transfer to another institution. Students from non-accredited institutions will generally have a harder time getting their transfer credits accepted at another institution especially those ones that are institutionally accredited. Many students now attend multiple institutions, either sequentially or concurrently, so the ease with which they can transfer their credits has become important.

For Universities that want to be accredited, though not mandatory, there are many regional, national and international accreditation agencies both in the USA and outside of the US. Many accreditation agencies accredit University programs; that is, Programs or Programmatic Accreditation for specialized programs such as medicine, Nursing, Agriculture, Pharmacy, Law, Accounting, Business, Engineering, Psychology, etc, while others accredit the University itself as a whole; that is, Institutional Accreditation in which case all programs of the University will be considered having been duly accredited. This means that Institutional accreditation applies to the entire University, specific programs, and distance education provided by the University.