In July 2000, 16 higher education leaders gathered to participate in an invitational symposium on preserving quality in distributed education. The symposium explored the topic of quality assurance in distributed learning, focusing on college-level, credit-bearing teaching and learning experiences. The first part of this paper focuses on questions and issues of quality assurance viewed largely from the perspective of institutions and agencies. The second part focuses on quality assurance from the point of view of consumers, students, employers, and graduate and professional schools. The accreditation process and many of the quality assurance methods used in the academy predate the consumer culture widely accepted today. How consumer needs differ from those of institutions and quality assurance agencies in the distributed learning environment is discussed. Most of the participants' attention was focused on the need to create some kind of mechanism, external to institutions, that would offer comparative quality information. Many participants thought that an independent entity, neither government nor the institution, would be the best organizer of a quality assurance system. (SLD)