ABSTRACT
The goal of accreditation is to ensure that education provided by institutions of higher education meets acceptable levels of quality. Among the many missions of higher education accreditation we can recognize several indigenous ones. Some are “charter” missions embraced in the early years of accreditation in the late nineteenth century. Others have developed as fundamental and indisputable expressions of the basic impetus behind accreditation, the affirmation of educational quality. Beyond articulating and applying essential criteria for what defines authentic colleges, higher education accreditation affirms their credibility. Facilitating transfer from one institution to another of students and earned academic credits has remained a consistent priority of higher education accreditation and is one of the expectations of the USDE. Higher education accreditation thus endeavors through its reviews not only to assess present performance but also to seek indicators of sustainability.
