Earn a High School Diploma Online

The first step in choosing an online high is to make sure that it is properly accredited. This is actually relatively easy as long as you follow the advice give below.

Types of Accreditation
In the United States, there exists two legitimate types of accreditation, regional and national.

Oddly enough, regional accreditation is considered by many to be the higher form of accreditation at the college level. At the high school level, they seem to be fairly comparable.

For the most part, there are six regional accrediting associations and a couple national accreditors. Just don't try to actually count them! The problem is that in some regions the regional association accredits all levels of all schools and in others, there are "sub-accreditors", my term, that accredit the K-12 schools.

Do you want to know my secret way to make sure it is accredited? I go to this website at the U.S. Department of Education:

Recognized Accrediting Associations

If it is not listed there, it is not a real accreditor. End of story.

How to use this knowledge
One reason why you need to understand accreditation is because that is how colleges decide whether what you have completed will be accepted by them.

Another reason is because, just as their are fake schools ("diploma mills"), there are also fake accreditors. Yes, there are many of these diploma mills on the Internet that say they are accredited. If they are not on the U.S. Department of Education website, they are lying.

Likewise, if a school says that it is accredited by the U.S. DOE, it is also lying. The DOE is not an accreditor.