Hyles-Anderson, an unaccredited college founded in 1972, is an hour drive from downtown Chicago and awards four-year degrees, operating independently of government oversight. Its website maintains this is to “avoid the potential of outside influences or pressures to change our theological, doctrinal, and moral position.” Hyles-Anderson did not respond to a request for comment.

While prospective applicants “must be either a high school graduate or have a GED certificate,” the admission policies at Hyles-Anderson also consider a student’s marital status. According to the 2025-2026 academic catalog, “Married students must be at least 20 years old by the first day of registration for each semester. Single, divorced students must be at least 25 years of age by the first day of registration for each semester.”

Tuition costs a modest $2,500 per semester with the total rising to $5,550 to include room and board and a registration fee. The alumni network is narrow, with graduates mostly appearing to funnel into the familiar pipeline of pastors, missionary, or ministry leader roles.

For men, the college experience at Hyles-Anderson took a much different trajectory than it did for women. According to Stuart Hardy, a former student who graduated in 2008 with a degree in assistant pastoral theology, while classes in subjects like English, history, and finance were coeducational, male students were also required each semester to take Church Education, essentially a bootcamp in how to run a church, and were notably exempt from the cooking and housekeeping courses that shaped the women’s curriculum.

That divide appears to persist; the course list for the current academic year differentiates between men-only and women-only degrees. Women-only programs include administrative assistant, missionary wife, and general studies in the department of Bible, while the men-only alternatives are missions, youth ministry, and pastoral theology.

“Men were there to study and find a wife. Women were just there to get a husband,” said Hardy.

Hardy, who now works in digital marketing in Southern California, was raised in a religious family where the natural trajectory to become a pastor was to attend a school like Hyles-Anderson.

“My dad was a pastor,” he said. “That was kind of the apex for people who wanted to go into the ministry. There were other colleges but that was supposedly the best one.”

Another former student, Shawn Collins, who left in 1997, recalled a similar divide. “The men took church every semester and the woman basically took classes on how to be a good wife,” Collins said. “I didn’t like the fact that the girls had a different curfew. They were treated like second-class citizens in my book.”

The college sits within a cluster of other unaccredited schools—many of them religious institutions—whose degrees hold no weight in the civil service and often go unrecognized in higher education and most workplaces.

Abroad, the rules are stricter. In Australia, calling your institution a university without government approval is against the law. In the UK, degrees can only be awarded by government-recognized institutions. In the US, though, the terms college and university are essentially unregulated at the federal level, although the federal government recognizes legitimate accrediting agencies, and most state agencies do regulate the term.

“A lot of people will say, ‘Oh you must’ve known better,’ but they’ve never lived that life and dealt with that level of sheltering,” said Mary, who asked that her last name not be used to protect her privacy. Mary graduated from Hyles-Anderson in 2007 and was unaware at the time of the limits of her degree. “Maybe there is somewhere in the fine lines, but I just think it should be made more clearly known to the students that unaccredited versus accredited will really hurt you in the end.”