United College Association

Our mission is to develop and promote high standards of competency, ethics, and academic freedom in different international open and distance learning environments.

The current need for quality assurance in both open and distance international learning programs has become a paramount issue in today's modern world of learning, online college degrees, and distance learning degrees.

For employers, colleges, and universities, there is a growing need to be able to correctly assess the value and worth of a particular institution's distance learning degree program and the respective qualifications of graduates of these said degree programs.

By setting and promoting high accreditation standards for international educational and training institutes; public confidence in open and distance learning institutions will surely grow.

For an institution to be accredited by the UCA, it needs to meet UCA's stringent requirements and comply with a strict code of ethics… on an ongoing basis.

Our accreditation process ensures that an institution will continue to strive to meet or exceed our guidelines in order to remain a member of our association.   

This approach of ours fosters a self-managing or self-reflective style of monitoring for each institution that we approve for accreditation.

We have found that this approach works better than the quality assurance approaches adapted by traditional educational compliance bodies as well as "rule-enforcing" governmental bodies. 

Our accreditation procedures and criteria for membership in the UCA insure that the degrees offered by a given UCA member institution will meet or exceed the accreditation guidelines set by traditional classroom-based colleges and universities.

The UCA, however, does not oversee the suitability or qualifications of a given academic program offered by an institution. Why?

Because currently there are no worldwide agreed upon standards with which to measure the academic worthiness of an institution's curriculum or course content.

Thus, we leave that up to the institution itself to follow its own regional and national requirements as stated by that institution's home country's legal and educational system.

An institution that is accredited by the UCA, has demonstrated a firm commitment to offering high quality educational programs to their graduates. This insures that the graduates themselves will be at least as qualified as graduates of traditional educational institutions… if not more.

UCA accreditation is good for one year, thus, an institution needs to renew their accreditation affiliation with UCA by agreeing to a yearly re-evaluation to see if any procedures, policies, or course programs have significantly changed.

Click here to view our accreditation guidelines.