What happens if your school loses accreditation?

Obviously, my question was prompted by the news about ACCS.

Suppose you have a degree that's accredited and the school later loses the accreditation. Do you still have an accredited degree? Would you have to explain this to employers or include a special note on your resume?

Just curious.

Roscoe

 

It all depends when you graduated, before accreditation and the school becomes accredited, you will have less to explain, the opposite, will raise question. However, if you graduated before losing it, then is accredited, after is not.

 

If you graduate while the school is accredited, you have a degree from an accredited school. Morris Brown College recently lost its accreditation. Informed ahead of time of the date of the announcement, the college moved up the end of the Spring semester in order to graduate its seniors while the college was still accredited.

The problem comes in when/if someone decides to verify the school's accreditation status at a later date. You might have graduated from it when it was accredited, but then it doesn't appear in guidebooks. The same dilemma is faced by graduates of schools that later shut their doors.

If faced with (a) graduating from an accredited school that later loses its accreditation or (b) graduating from an unaccredited school that later becomes accredited, I might choose the latter. People might check a school's accreditation status, but I wonder how many would check the date it became accredited and then compare it to when you graduated. Also, graduating from a "pre-accredited" school that is subsequently accredited seems more legitimate--as if the school was operating in an "accreditable" manner all along. I'm sure graduates from Walden, Union, Sarasota, and others who subsequently became accredited have benefitted from it.

 

My guess is that if you graduate while the school is still accredited you are okay. Afterwards, you have an unaccredited degree. Rich is also right that you have the problem of locating info on the school afterward. You should save catologues, etc.

North {who is not feeling real happy at the moment}

 

Most people would look it up on the Web these days. The Regional Accreditors should list historical info on their Websites, yes? They don't do it as prominently as they should. Searching on the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools' search page http://www.sacscoc.org/search.asp for "Morris Brown" turns up nothing, although http://www.sacscoc.org/pdf/webmemlist.pdf shows the years it was accredited.