DURHAM - Bachelor's degrees granted to 25 N.C. Central University students who attended an unauthorized satellite campus in suburban Atlanta could still be valid, the head of an accrediting agency said Wednesday.

NCCU officials have been in discussions for weeks with the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, a regional accrediting body. Now, NCCU has until Sept. 19 to answer a series of questions related to the academics offered at the Georgia campus, which was housed at a Lithonia, Ga., megachurch run by an NCCU trustee. If the answers prove satisfactory to the accrediting body, the students who earned degrees in hospitality and tourism, criminal justice and business administration may end up with accredited degrees after all, said Belle Wheelan, the agency's president.

"We always look out for the students," Wheelan said. "We are trying to make sure they have the quality education for which they're paying. A decision will be made as to whether those degrees are legitimate."

For four years beginning in the fall of 2004, NCCU offered courses and bachelor's degrees at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church through a program never authorized by NCCU or UNC system officials. Nor did NCCU notify the accrediting body of the program's creation. It was eventually submitted to the commission for approval but was denied earlier this year. The program was then shut down.

NCCU has always been accredited, but that designation doesn't cover the New Birth program because the accrediting agency never knew about it, and an official at the agency said last month that he didn't think such a change could be made retroactively.

But Wheelan said NCCU still has the chance to state its case and legitimize those degrees. In dealing with NCCU, the commission ventured into some uncharted waters, Wheelan said.

"This is the first time this has happened to us," she said.

Since the program was shut down, NCCU officials have scrambled to figure out what to do for the 25 program graduates and 39 students still enrolled. NCCU has not yet announced its plans for those 39 enrolled students.

A degree from an accredited institution generally represents a guarantee of academic preparedness, so an unaccredited degree may hurt a person's chances of getting into a graduate program or finding a job in some fields, experts have said. But the New Birth degrees are still from NCCU and bear no language distinguishing them from conventional university diplomas, so most grad school officials and potential employers might not ever know.

The details surrounding the program's origin remain unclear. Eddie Long, the pastor at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, has been an NCCU trustee since 2002. NCCU's chancellor at the time was James Ammons, now president at Florida A&M University. Ammons said last month that he assumed the program had been properly authorized, even though he regularly attended meetings of both the NCCU Board of Trustees and the UNC system's Board of Governors, the two governing boards that should have signed off on the initiative.

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