Why wouldn’t a regionally accredited college accept a college that is nationally accredited’s transcripts for a student to transfer?
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The same reason fancy restaurants let celebrities and hot girls skip the line. Because regionally accredited colleges are a club and they don’t want to allow the nationally accredited colleges into the club.
Traditional schools are generally regionally accredited. For profit schools are generally nationally accredited. The traditional schools don’t like the for-profit schools that have started up, and prefer to make life as difficult as possible for them and their students. Since transfer student rules are something the schools can fully control, this is one of the ways they express their dislike of the other class of schools.
The short answer is because they want to, and no law prevents them from doing this.
Sometimes it’s a matter of “nobody recently has transferred from A to B College and as such we haven’t spent any time evaluating the equivalency of the specific course you have taken”.
Transfer credit relies on an analysis of the content of courses, to see what the equivalent course should be. This takes some work, and a small regional probably only does that for a couple of big state schools. It’s not worth the time in a “university on the other side of the country” situation. Particularly if the courses are in a narrow major that’s not popular at the regional. Usually transfers go the other way, and a bigger school has more resources to do it.
Accreditation just means that some other organization (an accreditor) has investigated the ciricuulum at the school and declared that it is up to their standards. In the US, accredidation is not really a government thing, and there are lots of different accreditors with different methods and standards. The school receiving the transfer might not care about the opinion of the accreditor of the school sending the transfer.
Even if they did, accredidation applies to schools or programs as a whole, not classes. Suppose the first school covers calculus in “Math 1” and statistics in “Math 2”, but the second school teaches a mixture of calculus and statistics across 2 Math classes. A transfer with Math 1 from the first school might not be prepared for Math 2 at the second.
The national vs regional accreditation can be a little bit misleading.
While it may sound like national accreditation is more impressive, almost all colleges are accredited at the regional level. So to put it bluntly, many universities simply do not respect a school that cannot obtain regional accreditation.
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