"Big 3" education mills?

[dfrecore]

Jennifer said everything I would have said plus more. Though as a point of clarification, there is specific subject accreditation that sits on top of RA or NA academic accreditation. Some people would consider that "higher" since it represents accreditation in a specific academic domain, though it doesn't replace RA or NA accreditation.

For example, AACSB is the oldest and is generally considered the "gold standard" in business school accreditation. ACBSP is newer and more common, but is usually seen as second best. IACBE is the new kid on the block, and is generally not considered in the same ballpark as the first two, so comes in as a distant third place. A college doesn't need to have any of those secondary accreditations to teach business courses or offer business degrees, but they are not considered true business schools without one of them. The top firms and colleges will almost always prefer folks with AABSP accredited business degrees.

To further clarify, RA or NA accreditation is totally separate from the other types of accreditation.  So, you'll FIRST want to look for accreditation (preferably RA in most cases), and then you can look for additional accreditation if you need it from the "school within the school."  So the business school at a college can be accredited, the engineering school can have a different accreditation, etc.  There are different accrediting bodies for different areas, and only you know if that is important to you (AACSB vs. ACBSP was not important to me for my business degree, I didn't care if it was accredited at all as long as the school was).  But for some industries, this may be important.

But this is not what you were asking about, so I wanted to make sure that we're staying on point here.  Regional Accreditation is what you're looking for.