Let’s talk about another important topic: accreditation. 📥
Any school can say they deliver qualifications, but what are their value? If you open a school, the value of your qualifications will be one of the first questions prospective students will ask you, I can tell you. 🙊
Basically, accreditation is the process a school can go through to get their qualifications officially recognized by a State or a private organization. It’s how they can show that their qualifications hold value.
From the State’s point of view, accreditation is a way to make sure students don’t get fooled by training programs of poor quality. They want to protect them as individuals and customers. Accreditation is a sort of official stamp.
But accreditation can be confusing! There are so many types of accreditation, and it changes from one country to another. Let’s unpack this. 📦
Licensure
Before trying to get your qualification accredited, you most likely have to get a license to operate as a school or university.
Even if your school doesn’t deliver an official qualification, it needs some kind of authorization to open. This authorization, called “licensure”, varies from one country to another. Rules are also not the same depending on the type of school you’re building:
Pre-K-12?
K-12?
Postsecondary?
or even a training center?
I can’t list all the different cases here. What you need to remember is that just opening your school is usually subject to validation, even if this school doesn’t deliver a State-endorsed qualification.
🇺🇳 Country by Country
🇺🇸 USA
In the US, education is under each state’s juridiction. This means you need to get licensure state by state. The process can differ from one state to another.
As long as you intend to have students in a state (because you’re building a school there or you’re running an online school with potential students there), then you need to get licensed.
🇫🇷 France
In France, if you’re starting a training center (even if you’re alone), you will need to declare this activity. Rules are explained here. It’s not that hard to do, but you will need to prove your training activity every year as there are some tax exemptions when you’re running a training center. Training centers get listed on a public list operated by the French government. Each training center has its own operating number.
Then you have to be Qualiopi-accredited to access funding.
Degree Accreditation
Once you have a license and you can open your school, you might want to get your degree (or qualification) accredited. It’s not mandatory, but students tend to ask for some special recognition that your school is serious. Likewise, employers are more likely to hire people with accredited degrees. It reassures them that the person has learned at a “serious” institution.
Of course, a school can do without accreditation. It doesn’t have to get accreditation. It’s just a stamp that is likely to help them get recognition.
Accreditation is not simple: there are different rules in different countries, and it usually takes time. In the US, rules can be different in each state. And then, there are different types of qualifications, which can all have different accreditation rules.
🇺🇳 Country by Country
🇺🇸 USA
In the US, you should distinguish between regional accreditation bodies and national accreditation bodies. Some accreditation bodies will only give you accreditation for a certain state or region, while national ones cover a wider territory.
WASC is a regional accreditation body for the State of California. When you get accreditation from WASC, your accreditation is recognized but just in California.
DEAC is a national accreditation body. It covers most states… but not California. If you have accreditation in one of its member states (again, not California 😬), you can extend this accreditation recognition throughout the other states. This prevents the school from having to get accreditation in all 50 states, one by one.
🇫🇷 France
For academic degrees, you need:
To become a higher education institution.
Then ask for recognition by the state. Indeed, registering as a private higher education institution does not give automatic recognition by the French state. Official recognition by the Minister of Higher Education (Ministère de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche) is necessary in order to benefit from state subsidies and welcome students on a scholarship (supported by CROUS).
Business Schools Accreditation
Business schools are subject to the same accreditation rules I’ve mentioned just before. However, you should know that other accreditations exist that have been designed specifically for them.
These accreditations are international and handled by private non-profit organizations.
Because business schools compete for students and want to stand out. This explains why they usually look for more accreditations. It is a way for them to prove their worth.
The 3 most well-known business school accreditations are:
University Rankings
Accreditation helps schools and universities get some kind of official “stamp”. We know they’re good enough. However, students tend to look for the best school available.
There is no universal answer to this question. Some newspapers and magazines (The Guardian in the UK, Le Point in France…) publish their own rankings based on different criteria: the percentage of students who find a job, the average salary, the number of research papers published, etc. Each magazine has their own methodology, which means the same school could get a different position in different rankings.
One of the most famous rankings for universities is the Shanghai Ranking (alongside QS World University Rankings and Times Higher Education World University Rankings). It compares the top universities in the world, with a specific focus on academic research. The more research papers the university publishes, the more Nobel prizes come from the university, the better.
These academic rankings don’t really tell how well students fare in the professional world. They are more focused on “academic excellence”, which means having the most recognized teachers in their field, publishing research papers in the top scientific journals (Nature, Science…):
