AACSB International recently announced new accreditation standards effective July 28, 2020. Updating accreditation standards is a lengthy and arduous process and requires a vote of all accredited schools, which as you might imagine was made even more difficult in the middle of a global pandemic. Nevertheless, we prevailed and are excited to roll out these new standards. In this article, I’ll take you on our journey from the idea to move even faster than usual to realizing the vision of reimagining business education and why we’re so excited about this direction for AACSB, our members, and society at large.
By: Stephanie M. Bryant, PhD., Executive Vice President and Chief Accreditation Officer
AACSB: The Gold Standard in Business School Accreditation
If you went to business school, you may already be familiar with AACSB International, but in case you’re not, here’s a brief introduction. For over 100 years the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) has been the leading trusted voice in business education. With some 1,700 member organizations in over 100 countries and territories, AACSB’s global network connects business educators to peers and industry leaders to provide cutting edge thought leadership and advocacy for business education.
Within our membership, AACSB accredits over 870 of the world’s best business schools. AACSB accreditation is highly sought after and has been earned by only about five percent of the world’s schools offering business degree programs. The process of attaining AACSB accreditation occurs through a rigorous peer review process that takes on average about five years to successfully complete. Some schools can get through faster, some a little longer. Once a school attains AACSB accreditation, they undergo a peer review visit every five years to ensure the school remains aligned with the accreditation standards.
The standards that underlie the accreditation process are updated periodically, with the last two major revisions made in 2003 and 2013. One might deduce then that the next major revision would be in 2023. However, two years ago we began a conversation with our membership on considering changes to the standards on an accelerated path. That meant talking with our accredited members all over the world about how they would like to see AACSB accreditation standards evolve. My job as Chief Accreditation Officer of AACSB was to lead that effort.
The Case for Change
With accreditation standards, there is a steep investment in both creating and then implementing new standards, and in schools making necessary changes to align with the new standards. Thus, we do not move in this direction lightly. We must feel compelled by evidence around us that a sooner-rather-than-later approach is necessary. In our case, there were three major drivers that compelled us to change: 1) The speed of digital transformation in the world; 2) increased globalization of our network, and 3) a desire to move us closer towards fulfilling our vision of business education as a force for good in society.
The Digital Transformation Bullet Train
Work is being transformed as we speak by digital technologies. The finance and accounting industries in particular have experienced significant transformation of work. Blockchain, robotics, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality and other technologies are becoming increasingly commonplace. An audit of timber or coal, for example, can be facilitated using drone technology with real-time data being transmitted back to the audit firm’s digital platform. This transformation of work and an accompanying reflection of the knowledge, skills, and abilities today’s business school student should possess must be reflected in the business school curriculum. Today’s learners must have digital acumen and agility with current and emerging technologies, as well as a lifelong learning mindset. Updating our standards on curriculum, learning, and the impact of teaching was all related to ensuring both learners and faculty are prepared to entire the workforce with current knowledge, skills and abilities.
An Increasingly Globalized Network
An estimated 5,000,000 students are considered “internationally mobile” (Global Migration Indicators 2018, www.migrationdataportal.com), that is, studying in countries other than their native country. With AACSB accreditation reaching over 50 countries and territories, and volunteers in more than 60 countries, it is important that our standards be globally-oriented and principles-based to accommodate a variety of cultural contexts and school missions. Additionally, a variety of instructional, faculty deployment, and assurance of learning models are emerging that are in some cases very different from the traditional and U.S.-centric model of instructional delivery. The new standards reflect this global orientation and principles-based approach to quality assurance.
Business as a Force for Good in Society
Lastly, AACSB has a vision of business education as a force for good in society. We do this through preparing the leaders of the future and ensuring that AACSB-accredited business schools have an explicit strategy consistent with their mission for how they will contribute positively to society as a whole. This focus permeates the curriculum of the business school, the research a business school’s faculty produce, and the activities the business school sponsors and participates in to create positive impact on their local, regional, national or international communities. This is a theme we wove into the new accreditation standards in a consistent and prominent way.
The Result: The 2020 Business Accreditation Standards
Issuing new accreditation standards requires a majority vote of the Accreditation Council, that is, schools that already hold AACSB accreditation. Ordinarily this would have occurred in a matter of minutes at a business meeting at our International Conference and Meeting (ICAM). After thousands of volunteer hours and two exposure drafts over two years, who would have thought a global pandemic would interrupt our plans for an April 2020 vote? But of course that is exactly what happened. Fortunately, we were able to obtain the approval of the Accreditation Council through a written consent process that occurred over a 90-day window. The response was enthusiastic and overwhelming – the membership embraced the new standards and they were adopted on July 28, 2020 and will be phased in over three years.
The new standards consist of nine standards divided into three constructs, as shown below. Our goal was to continue to express rigor and quality through a more principles-based approach that allows for more contextual and professional judgment. This supports the global nature of our accredited schools and is how we can have one set of standards that can be applied consistently across the world. The language of the standards is far more globally-oriented as well, further emphasizing the global nature of our accreditation.
Strategic management is the foundation of an AACSB-accredited school. Here we emphasize that a school must have a robust strategic plan that is developed with input from key stakeholders and is reviewed and updated periodically. The mission statement is a key component of the strategic plan, as schools are expected to engage in activities that relate to their mission. For example, a school with a prominent research mission would be expected to have high-quality and impactful scholarly publications as this would be in line with their mission. Within their strategic mission, a school must also be explicit in how they plan to make a positive impact on society.
We also emphasize a lifelong learning model and growth mindset with respect to technology and that expectation is applied to both faculty and students. Schools are expected to support the lifelong learning objective and foster opportunities for such development to occur. Quality assurance of a relevant and timely curriculum and assurance of learning are prominently featured, with an emphasis on agility with current and emerging technology. Lastly, thought leadership, engagement and societal impact describe the expectations of an AACSB-accredited school. That involves move us towards fulfillment of the AACSB vision of transforming business education for global prosperity.
Reimagining Realized
Through this process we were able to move AACSB accreditation from a more rules-based input-oriented system that was heavily U.S.-centric to a more principles-based globally-oriented set of standards. We refocused the measurement of quality in terms of impact as opposed to pure counting of outputs. And, we inculcated the vision of AACSB of business as a force for good in society throughout the standards. Prominent in this version is the expectation that schools explicitly intend to make a positive impact on society, embed this in their curriculum, produce research that solves practical problems of the business practitioner and society as a whole, and engage in activities that promote positive societal impact. It is through these mechanisms that accreditation moves towards a different measure of quality – one that is about the good done in the world and less about counting.
Judging by the enthusiastic response of our members, we believe we are headed into an exciting new world where business education leads to solving some of society’s grand challenges and provides capable and skilled leaders of the future. It was a big shift for AACSB, but it is the right one. Leaders lead, and that is what we are doing—charting the course for business education of the future. What a privilege it is to be a part of this amazing moment in time!
