New England Association of Schools and Colleges

The New England Association of Schools and Colleges, Inc. (NEASC) is the U.S. regional accreditation association providing educational accreditation for all levels of education, from pre-kindergarten to the doctoral level, in the six-state New England region. It also provides accreditation for some international schools, particularly at the elementary and secondary levels. Founded in 1885, it is the oldest of the regional accreditors in the United States.

NEASC serves more than 2000 public and independent schools, colleges and universities in the six New England states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. As of 2011, the NEASC counted 253 degree-granting colleges, universities, and other post-secondary institutions, and 86 vocational-technical schools in its membership. The association's Commission on Public Secondary Schools had 650 member schools in the six-state New England region, including 641 accredited schools and nine candidates for accreditation. The Commission on Independent Schools had 615 members in New England and Canada, including 577 accredited schools and 38 candidate schools. Membership also included about 106 accredited public elementary and middle schools in New England and 175 accredited American/International schools in 68 nations around the world.

The NEASC is headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts.

Famous quotes containing the words england, association, schools and/or colleges:

    “While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “The spiritual kinship between Lincoln and Whitman was founded upon their Americanism, their essential Westernism. Whitman had grown up without much formal education; Lincoln had scarcely any education. One had become the notable poet of the day; one the orator of the Gettsyburg Address. It was inevitable that Whitman as a poet should turn with a feeling of kinship to Lincoln, and even without any association or contact feel that Lincoln was his.”
    —Edgar Lee Masters (1869–1950)

    “I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall now or at any time hereafter make schoolbooks of my works and make me hated as Shakespeare is hated. My plays were not designed as instruments of torture. All the schools that lust after them get this answer, and will never get any other.”
    —George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

    “The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.”
    —Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)