VOA慢速英语 2008 1016a

This is the VOA Special English Education Report.

Now, we continue our Foreign Student Series for those of you considering an American college or university.

One of the things you should make sure of is that the work you do will be recognized in your own country. Employers and schools are more likely to accept your American education if it came from an accredited¹ program.

Accreditation² is a process used for quality control. Across the United States, there are eighty accrediting³ agencies for higher education. These are private, nonprofit organizations. They develop educational goals, then examine schools to make sure the goals are met.

The first step is for a college or university to ask for accreditation. The school then measures its performance against the requirements.

After that, the accrediting agency sends a team of specialists to decide whether or not the school meets the standards. Accredited schools are observed every few years to see how they are doing.

Accrediting organizations must be recognized by either the federal government or the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. Almost half of all the agencies are recognized by both CHEA and the United States Department of Education.

Higher education groups created CHEA in nineteen ninety-six. But students who want to receive federal student aid must attend a school accredited by a government-recognized agency.

Foreign students might wonder why they should care much about all this. After all, foreign students in most cases do not receive aid from the United States government.

But accreditation is also meant to tell employers that your studies met a set of quality standards. And accreditation can make it easier to move credits from one school to another.

Seven thousand institutions and more than nineteen thousand programs were accredited by American organizations last year. Among them were almost five hundred foreign colleges, as well as foreign campuses of American universities.

All accredited schools and programs can be found on the CHEA Web site, chea.org. It also has advice about how to avoid worthless educational programs and accrediting agencies. We will talk more about that subject next week.

And that's the VOA Special English Education Report, written by Nancy Steinbach. Our Foreign Student Series is online at voaspecialenglish.com. I'm Steve Ember.

1 accredited   

adj.可接受的；可信任的；公认的；质量合格的v.相信( accredit的过去式和过去分词 )；委托；委任；把…归结于

参考例句：

• The discovery of distillation is usually accredited to the Arabs of the 11th century. 通常认为，蒸馏法是阿拉伯人在11世纪发明的。
• Only accredited journalists were allowed entry. 只有正式认可的记者才获准入内。

2 accreditation   

n.委派，信赖，鉴定合格

参考例句：

• a letter of accreditation 一份合格证明书
• This paper gives an overview of the Verification, Validation and Accreditation (VV&A) in High Level Architecture(HLA). 对基于高层体系结构(High Level Architecture,简称HLA)的仿真系统的校核、验证与确认(Verification, Validation and Accreditation,简称VV&A)问题进行了详细的介绍及分析。 来自互联网

3 accrediting   

v.相信( accredit的现在分词 )；委托；委任；把…归结于

参考例句：

• One accrediting agency is the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. 有一个资信鉴定机构是为了高等教育的。 来自互联网
• One accrediting agency is Council for Higher Education Accreditation. 高等教育授权委员会就是这样一个授权机构。 来自互联网