By Ulrich Hommel is Managing Director of XOLAS y Julie Perrin-Halot is Associate Dean and Director of Quality, Strategy and International for Grenoble Ecole de Management, France
Business schools view international accreditation as an entry into the upper echelons of the management education “industry”. Accreditation can for instance facilitate a targeted upgrade of the academic partnership portfolio (in effect supporting a dynamic alignment with the school’s developmental ambitions), providing more strategically oriented partnering as well as greater international visibility for faculty recruitment. But what benefits does it provide for business school stakeholders, in particular students?
Value-Added of Accreditation
Students benefit from accreditation in various ways. For one, the accreditation label represents a credible proxy signal of the school’s quality when selecting a program at the application stage and provides assurance that they will be enjoying a learning experience in line with what is on offer at other top business schools around the world. Furthermore, accreditation helps to monetize educational achievement with better placement and early-career progression. Many of these benefits are however implicit and often not well understood by business school stakeholders, including alumni and students. This is where our analysis sets in.
The Evolving Role of Accreditation
To get started, we provide a conventional discussion of the value-added from the students’ perspective, to then examine why the link between degree delivery and quality is not well understood by the typical “business school client”, be it a student, alumnus or employer. We see the accreditation agencies in the driver’s seat addressing these issues and subsequently offer guidance for how they can move forward. As a final step in our argument, we offer some reflections on how sector dynamics, including the COVID pandemic, are impacting the external quality assurance role of accreditors. We believe that accreditors will, as a consequence, need to interject themselves differently in the business school’s quality management agenda and, at the same time, work to ensure that their role as a quality lever is better understood by students and others.
Accreditors as Student Advocates
Fostering the quality of the student experience is at the core of the accreditation agenda (which, by its very design, is a quality improvement undertaking). In choosing an accredited school, students are assured that every dimension of their learning experience, both in and out of class, has undergone intensive scrutiny and complies with strict industry standards. AASCB’s Assurance of Learning (AoL) standard serves as a case in point.
AACSB-accredited schools have proven through AoL the presence of robust processes to measure and guide their degree programs’ capacity to develop student competencies. This has to happen in line with the school’s mission and the level as well as specialization of the degree. In effect, the school guarantees student readiness to enter the job market in their area of study through the use of tools such as assessment rubrics that detail each competency and the desired levels of achievement. Because this process requires regular tracking of student performance across competencies, the school must remain firmly invested in a dynamic process of review and improvement.
Another example is EFMD’s Internationalization standard that requires schools to maintain a holistic approach to internationalization with broad exposure for students through program mobility, curricular content, school environment and context, and to facilitate meaningful interaction with diverse cultures and nationalities.
Accreditation as a Quality Proxy for Stakeholders
There is often confusion among business school stakeholders as to the difference between accreditation and rankings as markers of quality. Prospective students tend to look to the rankings for information on the quality of schools, yet rankings merely provide a market perspective by sorting those schools fortunate enough to be ranked into different tiers according to criteria that are not based on standards of quality. Because of their visibility in well-known media, rankings tend to be seen as the primary source of information about how “good” a school and its degree programs are. Unfortunately, there is still not sufficient brand awareness around the accreditation labels and business school stakeholders are not generally informed about the actual impact and importance of the accreditations in attesting to quality. It is the genuine responsibility of the accreditors themselves to change this state of affairs.
Withering Accreditation Fatigue
While the triple crown of accreditation (AACSB, AMBA, EQUIS) is still an accolade that business schools are aspiring to, there is also substantial accreditation fatigue present in the sector. If one quality label suffices as an entry ticket into the illustrious media rankings, why duplicate the effort and acquire several of them? Yes, the different accreditation systems play a complementary role in advancing the school’s quality improvement agenda. But, if their respective role is not understood by stakeholders, then the return on investment may easily be perceived as negative on the margin. This highlights this article’s base conjecture from a different perspective.
Whatever the approach taken by accreditors, it must be based on a much closer partnership with the business community and focus on helping schools to become more relevant and impactful. Why not, for instance, transform accreditation from a peer-based to a stakeholder-based system? While current positioning of the leading systems is shaped by self-reflection of the accreditors’ business school membership plus selective avenues for giving stakeholders a formal voice, they could be transformed into partnership projects with non-academic organizations that help to establish and uphold impact and relevance as necessary and, in certain respects, even sufficient conditions for quality in management education. Professional bodies (CFA Institute, Project Management Institute (PMI) and similar) could serve as beachheads for realizing this ambition.
COVID-19 and the Changing Narrative of Accreditation
The current pandemic poses special challenges for business schools as well as accrediting agencies. It has given sector dynamics a higher momentum and to some extent a different direction. Formally speaking, creeping risks related to technological change (so-called Gray Rhinos) have been put on hyper-speed by the pandemic. While many business school leaders are still hoping for a return to the “old normal”, the realization is seeping in that a “new normal” is in the process of emerging that will push forward the deinstitutionalization of management education.
From our perspective, the most likely scenario is that students will become endowed with greater degrees of freedom for choosing their provider in an increasingly virtualized learning space. They will select a particular business school as an entry and exit point of their learning journey, but will otherwise take advantage of the ability to roam within a network of schools that the admitting business school is affiliated with.
Students will in principle value greater choice but will also require assurances of the quality of their education prior to joining a school network. They will furthermore appreciate quality-focused guidance as they navigate in their learning journey with potentially multiple institutional touch points along the way. To fulfill such needs, accreditors need to shift attention from the business school with well-defined boundaries to a potentially highly customized student experience within a deinstitutionalized learning environment.
The Opportunity of Renewal
Deinstitutionalization provides a unique opportunity for accreditors to take attention away from ranking organizations who will be struggling to compress the rising complexity of degree provision into an ordinal ordering of providers. It comes with the challenge to deconstruct the conventional conception of quality and move to a framework that is less structurally focused and able to capture the customization opportunities offered to students. Ultimately, the student experience and their confidence in and satisfaction with that experience must remain at the heart of choices made and actions taken.
Ulrich Hommel is Managing Director of XOLAS, a consultancy company supporting the development of business school clients globally. He is the former Director of Quality Services and current Director of the Quality Assurance Academy at EFMD Global; he has published extensively on topics related to business school accreditation. He is also a Professor of Finance at EBS University of Business & Law in Germany.
Julie Perrin-Halot is Associate Dean and Director of Quality, Strategy and International for Grenoble Ecole de Management in France. She regularly carries out peer review, mentoring and other training missions for the international accreditation agencies; she has published extensively on topics relating to business schools.
