The term "institutional effectiveness" was developed in response to accreditation, and this emphasizes the large extent to which accreditation drives institutional effectiveness efforts on community college campuses. There are two general types of accreditation. "Institutional accreditation" is the process by which institutions of higher education are evaluated as a whole with an eye toward their unity of purpose and the extent to which the sum of the parts complement the whole. "Programmatic accreditation" focuses on components--programs, courses of study, and sometimes individual courses--within the institution. In this article, the authors focus solely on one type of institutional accreditation, which is commonly referred to as "regional accreditation" because the U.S. Department of Education, as well as the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), recognizes six agencies that confer accreditation to colleges and universities in their respective regions of the United States and abroad. The intent of this article is to briefly examine the institutional effectiveness requirements of each of the six agencies.