Quality Assurance vs. Accreditation: What’s the Difference?

When you enroll in a university or hire a graduate, how do you know the education they received genuinely meets acceptable standards? Two mechanisms sit at the heart of this question in higher education: Quality Assurance (QA) and Accreditation. They are frequently mentioned together, sometimes used interchangeably, yet they are distinct processes with different purposes, actors, and outcomes. Understanding the difference – and how they complement each other – is essential for educators, policymakers, students, and employers alike.

Defining quality assurance 🔗

Quality assurance in higher education encompasses the policies, procedures, and practices designed to assess, improve, and maintain the quality of education within an institution. As the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning defines it, QA is “the process, supported by policies and systems, used by an institution to maintain and enhance the quality of education experienced by its students and of the research undertaken by its staff.”

In practical terms, quality assurance practices cover a broad range of institutional activities – curriculum design, faculty development, student assessment methods, program review, and self-evaluation. These are not one-off events; they form a continuous cycle that institutions embed into their everyday functioning.

Internal vs. external quality assurance 🔗

QA operates on two levels. Internal QA refers to the systems an institution builds within itself – how it reviews its own programs, gathers student feedback, measures learning outcomes, and acts on findings. External QA involves independent agencies assessing whether an institution’s internal mechanisms are effective. As the European University Association notes, the primary responsibility for quality assurance rests with the institutions themselves, but external checks ensure accountability and transparency to the wider public.

Importantly, typical QA practices focus on the development of new programs and the periodic review and renewal of existing ones. These processes are usually embedded in institutional policies to document requirements and communicate expectations across faculties and departments.

Understanding accreditation 🔗

While QA is largely an internal, ongoing process, accreditation is a formal, external act of recognition. The Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) describes accreditation as a review of the quality of higher education institutions and programs, serving as a major way that students, families, government officials, and the public know that an institution provides a quality education.

The U.S. Department of Education explains that accreditation arose as a means of conducting non-governmental, peer evaluation of institutions and programs to insure a basic level of quality. Private associations adopted criteria reflecting sound educational standards and developed procedures to evaluate whether institutions were operating at those levels.

How the accreditation process works 🔗

The accreditation process is systematic and multi-stage. As outlined by the Congressional Research Service, it generally begins with an institutional self-assessment, followed by a review by an external team of peers primarily drawn from higher education faculty and practitioners. This is followed by a comprehensive report submitted to the accrediting body, an accreditation determination, and then regular subsequent reviews of accredited institutions. Accreditation is typically a voluntary process – institutions request it – and is granted for a specified number of years, after which re-accreditation must be sought.

There are two main types of accreditation. Institutional accreditation evaluates the overall quality of a college or university. Programmatic (or specialized) accreditation evaluates specific departments or degree programs – such as law, medicine, engineering, or social work – against field-specific standards. Many prospective employers in regulated professions, for instance, require that applicants hold degrees from programs with recognized programmatic accreditation.

Why accreditation matters: institutions, students, and employers 🔗

Accreditation is not a procedural formality. Its effects ripple outward from institutions to the individuals they serve and the employers who hire their graduates.

For institutions 🔗

Accreditation signals credibility. It enhances an institution’s reputation, making it more attractive to prospective students, faculty, and research partners. Beyond reputation, accreditation is often a prerequisite for accessing public funding. In many countries, institutions must be accredited to receive government grants or to be eligible for student financial aid schemes.

For students 🔗

Accreditation provides students assurance that they are receiving a quality education that will be recognized by employers, licensing boards, and other colleges or universities. It also has direct financial implications: in the United States, students at unaccredited institutions are generally ineligible for federal financial aid. Students also benefit from improved credit transferability – accredited institutions tend to have agreements with other accredited institutions, making it easier to transfer credits or pursue graduate studies elsewhere.

For employers 🔗

Accreditation gives a degree weight when employers evaluate job applicants. It removes guesswork – employers can trust that graduates from accredited programs have met a recognized standard of academic preparation. Employers also factor accreditation into decisions about whether to provide tuition assistance to current employees and when making charitable contributions to educational institutions. In professional fields like healthcare and engineering, graduating from a programmatically accredited program is often a licensing requirement, not merely a preference.

The dual purpose: assurance vs. improvement 🔗

One of the most important – and often misunderstood – aspects of QA and accreditation is that they serve two related but distinct purposes: ensuring minimum standards and driving continuous improvement. Getting the balance right between these two goals is an ongoing challenge for institutions and regulatory bodies alike.

Accreditation as a compliance floor 🔗

Accreditation is fundamentally about compliance. It asks: does this institution meet a defined baseline of quality? As Ithaka S+R’s analysis of the U.S. higher education system notes, the goal of quality review should not merely be to ensure that minimum standards are met, or to enforce a particular image of what education should look like. Yet in practice, accreditation’s gatekeeping function – determining who can access public funding and grant recognized qualifications – means it often operates primarily as a compliance check. Institutions that fail to meet requirements face serious consequences, including loss of accreditation and ineligibility for federal aid.

Quality assurance as a growth engine 🔗

QA, by contrast, is oriented toward improvement rather than compliance. Published research in Quality in Higher Education draws a clear distinction: quality assurance is a meta-process concerned with maintaining standards, while quality enhancement is about augmenting and improving learners’ knowledge, skills, and institutional practices. In the best-functioning systems, QA does not stop at the question “are we good enough?” – it asks “how do we keep getting better?”

The European Standards and Guidelines (ESG), which form the basis of quality assurance systems across much of Europe, are explicitly designed to promote transparent and fair internal and external QA procedures for the continuous improvement of teaching and learning. This framework encourages institutions to move away from periodic, compliance-driven reviews toward embedding a culture of quality in their day-to-day work.

Where the two meet 🔗

In well-designed systems, QA and accreditation reinforce each other. Research by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) found that many institutions and state agencies default to accreditation as both a definition and a measure of quality – while also recognizing that accreditation should serve as a minimum threshold, not the ceiling. Institutions have a responsibility to assure quality above and beyond what accreditation requires.

The challenge, then, is that an over-reliance on accreditation as the primary quality measure can reduce QA to a box-ticking exercise. When institutions focus only on meeting accreditation requirements, they risk losing sight of the deeper goal: genuine, sustained educational improvement. Conversely, when QA processes are robust and genuinely embedded in institutional culture, accreditation becomes a more meaningful and credible external validation of real quality – not just a formal stamp of approval.

What do you think? Should accreditation be treated as a minimum threshold that institutions simply meet – or should it be redesigned to actively reward continuous improvement? And given that quality assurance is largely an internal process, how should institutions ensure it genuinely drives change rather than becoming a bureaucratic compliance exercise?

References

1. https://www.enic-naric.net/page-accreditation-recognition-quality-assurance
2. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000261356
3. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1132941.pdf
4. https://www.eua.eu/downloads/publications/examining%20quality%20culture%20part%20i%20quality%20assurance%20processes%20in%20higher%20education%20inst.pdf
5. https://edst.educ.ubc.ca/quality-in-higher-education-meanings-tensions-and-practices/
6. https://www.chea.org/about-accreditation
7. https://www.ed.gov/laws-and-policy/higher-education-laws-and-policy/college-accreditation/accreditation-in-the-us
8. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R43826
9. https://hospitalityinsights.ehl.edu/quality-assurance-accreditation-certification
10. https://www.hlcommission.org/for-students/how-accreditation-works-for-you/
11. https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/choosing-university-articles/accreditation-everything-you-need-know
12. https://online.regiscollege.edu/blog/what-is-accreditation-and-why-does-it-matter-for-you
13. https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/quality-assurance-in-u-s-higher-education/
14. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13538322.2016.1227207
15. https://sheeo.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/SHEEO_QualityAssurance.pdf