Changing Landscape of Accreditation for Business Schools

Recently, AACBE had a meeting among its commission members and accredited business schools in which changes in accreditation processes and standards were discussed.  The commission members were encouraged to review the standards and make suggestions for improvements. 

The new accreditation standards will run for testing purposes for a year and will be finalized in the annual meeting.  During the meeting, the president of the AACBE said that the commission pursued three goals: revising reaccreditation, considering the accreditation unit, and revising the accreditation standards.

• Reaccreditation:

The first thing AACBE did was to change the entire reaccreditation process to what they now call maintenance of accreditation. Twenty schools went through the accreditation review under this experimental system and all of them reacted positively to the experience. The business schools that participated in the experimental review process, questionnaires were sent to the dean, the chair of the review committee, the president, and the provost, asking them to evaluate the new system. Responses were uniformly favorable as far as support for the process. An additional 15 schools are scheduled to undergo the maintenance of accreditation process and many more schools have volunteered to be reviewed under the new guidelines.  

• Accreditation Unit:

After much consideration, it was decided that the entire business institution will be accredited. The institution can ask that certain programs be excluded for various reasons, and the AACBE commission members will decide what to allow. This decision has received a lot of positive reaction because it allows the institution some discretion over what is included and what isn’t. The schools up for re view will be asked to provide a list of exclusions up to two years before the review takes place, which will ensure that both the school and the business accreditation committee know exactly what is being considered in the accreditation review.  

• Accreditation Standards:

Although still undergoing revision, the accreditation standards are about 90 percent complete. Some of the most significant changes involved making the standards less U.S.-centric. This required changing some of the measurement concepts that are specific to U.S. schools, as well as some of the language. “Words like ‘diversity,’ ‘full-time equivalents,’ ‘tenure’ and ‘tenure track’ were modified for the global school setting. The AACBE also moved away from describing what specific courses should be in the curriculum to focusing on learning outcomes.

While the change in standards will allow schools more flexibility in meeting certain requirements, some members have expressed concern that the new standards might lack some quantitative preciseness.

The committee plans to have the standards finalized and ready for the AACBE’s annual meeting. By that time, the standards will have been reviewed by many different groups, the unit will have been pretty well established, and the maintenance of the accreditation process will have been through much experimental use. There’s a lot of thoughtful discussion going on, but in most cases members have made strong comments of support.