The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) is a US-based, non-governmental accreditation body founded in 1932 and headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. It accredits individual programmes — not institutions — across engineering, computing, technology, and applied and natural sciences. ABET is the established benchmark for engineering education in the United States: graduates of ABET-accredited programmes meet the educational prerequisite for US Professional Engineer (PE) licensure tracks. Beyond the US, ABET is the American signatory to the Washington Accord, a mutual-recognition agreement whose other signatories — including the UK, Australia, Canada, and Türkiye (via MÜDEK) — treat accredited degrees as meeting their own baseline engineering-education standards. That equivalence is not automatic licensure anywhere; each country's engineering authority makes its own final determination.
TRNC universities holding ABET accreditation
Two TRNC universities hold verified ABET accreditation, and their scopes differ meaningfully.
EMU — Eastern Mediterranean University: programmatic accreditation covering "Faculty of Engineering — Electrical, Civil, Mechanical, Computer, Industrial, Management, Mechatronics, Software Engineering (BSc)". This is one of the broader ABET footprints among TRNC institutions, spanning eight named BSc programmes.
METUNCC — Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus: programmatic accreditation covering "B.S. — Electrical & Electronics, Mechanical, Computer, Chemical, Civil, Petroleum & Natural Gas Engineering". Six BSc programmes are listed. METUNCC operates as a campus of METU Ankara, a Washington Accord-relevant context worth noting when researching graduate outcomes.
Both hold programme-level accreditation only. No faculty, school, or institution-wide ABET status is claimed for either.
What to verify
Before treating ABET accreditation as a given for your chosen programme, confirm the following.
- Find your exact programme on ABET's public database at abet.org — accreditation is programme-specific, not faculty-wide; a neighbouring department may not be listed.
- Check the accreditation's valid-until date on that same record; cycles run six years and can lapse.
- If you plan to practise engineering in a specific country, contact that country's licensure authority directly — Washington Accord equivalence is a starting point, not a guarantee of registration.
Official register: https://www.abet.org/