span class="h1">NEWSLINE - Summer 1999

Road To AACSB Accreditation Now Circles The Globe

For the first time this fall, all AACSB educational institution members, including those beyond the U.S. and Canada, can volunteer to travel the road that leads to AACSB accreditation.

The success of international peer review pilot studies and the value that pilot institutions and peer review team members derived from the experience were key factors in the AACSB determination to continue and expand the effort. Of the 12 Latin American, European and Asian institutions involved in the pilot phase, launched in 1996, eight have achieved accreditation, and the remaining four are targeting accreditation by April 2000. In the final report of the AACSB International Peer Review Task Force, chair John Seybolt, senior vice president for academic affairs, Thunderbird, American Graduate School of International Management, wrote that the benefits of the pilot studies were significant and "clearly outweighed the challenges that were discovered." Expansion beyond the United States and Canada is critical, the report said, because peer review and accreditation are the ways that AACSB "extends its unique franchise in a logical way, building on its historical area of competence and its traditional competitive advantage."

The post-pilot phase began with two working groups of volunteers gathering feedback from the task force and relating that information to their own experience. The groups, headed by Sam Gould, business dean at the University of Dayton, and John Kraft, business dean at the University of Florida, then developed eligibility criteria and application procedures for non-U.S. and Canadian educational members intent on pursuing accreditation.

A new committee, the Accreditation Application Review Committee (AARC), chaired by Gary G. Williams, business dean at the University of San Francisco, is overseeing the application process.

The eligibility process will provide a preliminary analysis on how the institution appears to satisfy AACSB accreditation standards, along with recommendations of different tracks that the applicant may wish to pursue. Doing so will help maximize the benefits of the accreditation process and minimize any unexpected challenges that might become problematic for the institution or for AACSB. "Schools in the U.S. and Canada have had a lot of opportunities to become familiar with the standards, while those beyond the U.S. and Canada haven’t had that advantage," Gould said. He further pointed out that institutional accreditation, which is a pre-condition for U.S. and Canadian members, doesn’t exist in all world regions. Institutions without such accreditation may not be accustomed to gathering the kind of data the self-evaluation process requires.

The application process requires institutions to complete an institutional profile form. The completed form provides information about the institution’s offerings, governance, faculty and enrollment, as well as already published materials such as catalogs, policy manuals and strategic plans.

"Since we are literally dealing with the rest of the world here, the schools applying will be in various stages of development," Gould said. "We will need to sort and sift, encouraging the institutions that are ready to proceed, and giving those that are not some ideas about what they might do to get ready."

The 12 institutions in the pilot process were selected because they had established reputations for quality management education; and they provided a broad sampling of world regions, education models and cultural environments to test the applicability of AACSB standards and procedures. The size of the pilot group was limited by the available resources of AACSB, the staff, advisors and peer review team members.

In the post-pilot phase, institutions will voluntarily apply for consideration. This voluntary application will ensure consistency in the application process, alleviating concern that the process might be skewed to specific institutions or geographical regions.

Although the pilot institutions had no guarantee that they would achieve accreditation, the task force and AACSB accreditation committees want to dispel any hint of partiality, said Kraft.

"If you approach an institution and ask it to go through a pilot phase, it has a different approach than if it could come forward voluntarily," Kraft said. "We chose to eliminate the invitations. We also wanted to eliminate the idea that we would try to get balance around the world. If we are an international organization, the process should be open to all educational members to seek accreditation, whether they are well known or not, whether in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia or Oceania. It is their choice."

Kraft thinks that the increase in non-U.S. membership in AACSB, 26 approved in FY98-99, will be reflected by the growing number of institutions that will choose to pursue accreditation.

Greg Whittred, associate dean at the University of New South Wales’ Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM), a new AACSB member, backs up Kraft’s belief. "I jumped at the opportunity to participate on the team for Warwick to get an insider’s perspective on what it would take to achieve accreditation," Whittred said. "Now, I guess I’m sitting at the head of the queue, with my foot on the accelerator, ready to go. But it’s a matter of them dropping the flag."

The flag was dropped this summer. Guidelines for applying and the eligibility criteria were distributed in July. The AARC will begin reviewing completed applications in the fall. The applications will be sorted into one of two readiness categories, based on the committee’s assessment.

The first category will be for institutions that appear to be ready to apply for accreditation. Institutions in this category meet the eligibility criteria and have demonstrated reasonably sufficient familiarity with the accreditation standards that more likely lead to production of a reasonably acceptable self-evaluation report.

"Essentially, they appear to be ready for the self-evaluation process," Williams said. "Subsequently, the chair of the Business Accreditation Committee (BAC) and host dean would work toward mutual agreement on the team composition, and we would go through the normal process of their filing a self-evaluation report and have the on-site review, identical to the process for U.S. and Canadian members."

The second category will be similar to a candidacy-type process, Williams said. "There are clearly important issues to be dealt with that appear likely to be resolved within a five-year or so period." Institutions in this category will be assigned an advisor to work with them on those issues, which would have to be resolved before they would be considered eligible to apply for initial accreditation. Currently, the candidacy-type partnership program is under development. It is anticipated that the program will be available in spring 2000.

"None of this implies that an institution is accreditable," Kraft said. "It is really to ascertain that the institution understands the standards and should be able to produce an effective self-evaluation report. It is up to the institution to product the self-evaluation report and visit that convinces its peer review team to recommend accreditation. But we first want to assess a likelihood of readiness."

Benefits of Moving Forward
For more than three years since the peer review pilot effort was approved, those closely involved say they have no doubt about the present and potential value to be gained by globalizing accreditation processes.

The advisors, team chairs and members have had firsthand opportunities to learn innovative approaches and best practices from institutions in Europe, Asia, Mexico, Central and South America.

Without fail, those interviewed said, there also was continuous learning from the discussions among the educators on the teams and at the host schools. For example, while serving on ITAM’s peer review team, Larry Penley, business dean at Arizona State University, learned about Cranfield University’s "MBA preview day" from dean Leo Murray, who also was serving on the ITAM review team. For the preview day, the school brings in outstanding MBA candidates and lets them see how classes are conducted. "It allows them to make a clearer judgment about whether your MBA program fits their needs, abilities and expectations," Penley said. ASU has subsequently implemented this practice.

Serving on the international teams has allowed educators to learn about innovative approaches to improving distance education, collaborative teaching, faculty recruitment and development, strategic use of alumni, and impacting community policy and economic development. Peer review team members for the University of Warwick saw an entrepreneurial school that offers a range of one-year MBAs, whose coursework matches what U.S. students accomplish in 18 months or two years.

The school has been offering distance education degrees, an arena still new to most U.S. business schools, since the mid ‘80s. Warwick initiated distance degree programs to extend its reach beyond the UK into world markets.

"Now everyone is looking at how they can extend their reach," Kraft said. "This is just another form of the competition out there. We’re only at the front end, while Warwick and Open University have been in business for almost 20 years," Kraft said. "They have a system able to handle a large number of students and do it with a very efficient and effective mechanism." Another area that Warwick has developed extensively is faculty collaboration. "We talk about team teaching, but for us it is a real stretch to involve two people in teaching half a course," Kraft said. At Warwick, faculty members may be involved in as many as 15 different courses in a single year. Various faculty are responsible for delivering lectures, offering tutorials, advising students, grading papers, or managing graduate students involved in the course. "A course is not the property of one individual; they take a collective approach to presenting the curriculum. There may be five or six faculty participating in the delivery of one course," said Kraft.

In the United States, even schools that will never approach the curriculum in this way, can learn something about how effectively Warwick gains maximum benefit from faculty talents, Kraft said.

To help make the fee-generating short courses and customized programs more palatable for its faculty, Warwick takes a significant portion of its fee income off the top and puts it into a fund for innovation in teaching and research.

"It is not used for underwriting salaries. It is income being poured back in to the things faculty love," Whittred said. "At AGSM, we have the same dilemma. Thirty percent of our operating income comes from short courses. We are trying to implement something like Warwick’s strategy now."

At INCAE, in Costa Rica, Seybolt said he discovered how to nurture new faculty in a way he had never thought about, and is considering implementing a version of it at Thunderbird. Faculty look for top students as they are go through programs, and invite some to stay and work as research associates for a couple of years. The primary work of these students is writing cases that are pertinent to Central American industries and markets. After having a chance to see how well the students write cases and do other research activities, the school asks those who are especially good if they would be willing to be on the faculty for a certain number of years, with the condition that INCAE pays for their Ph.D.

"They send students to Harvard, Wharton, Michigan, Minnesota," Seybolt said. "So they have people in top Ph.D. programs who then come back and join their faculty. A U.S. dean of a small business school who may be having a hard time recruiting because he can’t compete with Harvard and Stanford, might consider supporting an excellent student in this way and having the student spend four or five years on the faculty." Seybolt also has invited INCAE’s rector, Roberto Artavia, to come to Thunderbird to speak with the administrative team about how his school contracts with non tenure-track faculty, using a weight system INCAE devised for teaching, research, consulting and other activities, based on its institutional goals.

Artavia explained how he thinks other AACSB members can learn from his school, which was founded by seven Latin American countries.

"INCAE has a level of influence that is unique because we have managed to make a business school become a force not only in preparing leaders in the private sector, but actually become a think tank for the private sector itself and for the governments of the seven member countries," Artavia said.

Meeting at least once a year with the presidents of these countries, INCAE business faculty instruct the leaders in new trends in business, macro and micro economics and competitiveness.

"The fact that we have been able to be so influential without losing the focus of being fundamentally a business school has had some of the peer review team members ask us to come to their schools and explain how we have grown the boundaries of a business school," Artavia said. "We not only prepare individuals but also help prepare the business environment in which these individuals are going to work. I think we can contribute a lot, particularly in the area of internationalizing business schools."

Another accredited institution in Mexico, the ITESM Monterrey campus, has what Williams calls "an outrageously good" distance learning network that reaches into many Mexican cities. He also admires the school’s creation of a learning community, and the faculty’s ability to team teach. As a result of his learning experience as advisor and team chair at ITESM, Williams invited the dean, Jaime Alonzo Gomez, to give the commencement address in May 1998. He also has sent faculty down to ITESM to look at what they are doing in both distance education and in building a learning community, and he plans to send more.

On the other side of the world, at Chinese University of Hong Kong, the visit team saw in action a school whose mission is to become one of the top 30 business schools in the world with international standards and attainments.

"They are benchmarking constantly with the top 30 schools to see what is it they haven’t done, what they should do," said Cascade Huan, AACSB’s director of global accreditation. "These people are vigilant. They are blessed with an active and supportive alumni body that literally controls the economic arteries of Hong Kong. The team met with the alumni, including CEOs from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Hang Seng Bank and the Jardine. It is an impressive group of people, committed to the school; they donate money and give constant feedback regarding relevance and what needs to be changed to keep up with the fast-changing environment in Hong Kong," she said.

International peer review team members also had the opportunity to stretch their ability to think and contribute in completely different cultures than those in which they normally work.

One area the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) team worked on was general education. In Hong Kong, most general education courses are offered in a seven-year secondary program. "We received suggestions on how to broaden our general education program and to utilize resources offered by other schools in our university. It is important that AACSB help schools outside North America to develop standards for excellent management education within their own cultures and local contexts," said Yuk-Shee Chan, dean of business at HKUST. China, which Hong Kong rejoined in 1997, does not have an institutional accreditation process.

"It’s very important for us to have the recognition of achievement of the quality standards as articulated by AACSB," Chan said. "The word about accreditation has spread very fast. Quite a number of business schools, not only in Hong Kong, but in this whole region are interested in what we have gone through."

Even for those not on peer review teams that will conduct reviews in the next couple of years, the benefits of international accreditation will be substantial, task force members say.

As more institutions in all parts of the world achieve AACSB accreditation, there will be that many more schools prepared to forge practical alliances, based on their mission, strategy and the research interests of faculty. "It will be exactly like what happens when a U.S. school has a relationship with another U.S. school," Seybolt said. "When an institution, say, in the Middle East achieves accreditation, a U.S. school will be able to know if the two schools are alike enough in terms of quality that it would be good to approach that school."

One of the hindrances to productive alliances with overseas schools has been the lack of a yardstick to determine whether an alliance would be appropriate.

Gould said the value of AACSB accreditation being used as a yardstick already can be seen in reverse. "When schools overseas are looking for partners in the U.S., one of the first things they do is look for accredited schools. Now that benefit will go both ways." Seybolt, who was the advisor for INCAE, acknowledged that the direct benefits so far have flowed to those who have been at the pilot institutions and on the international teams. "It has been a chosen few, but the ‘chosen few’ is going to become so many more. There will be amazing learning going on, just as for those of us who already have done that. By the board saying, ‘Yes, we are going to move forward,’ we are spreading the wealth," Seybolt said. "We are going to need so many team members who haven’t been team members before. That’s probably the most important way benefits will be spread to the membership."

In the pilot studies, the task force deliberately asked for team members who had international education experience, Seybolt acknowledged. Now, the objective will be to enlist colleagues who aren’t as familiar with international schools so that they can gain experience. Many schools could be impacted in a fairly short period, just through peer review teams and the BAC. "If each team consists of five people and there are 12 or 15 visits done in a year," Gould said, "and all of that material is reviewed by BAC members, you can influence 110 schools or so in that process." He said if the applications for peer review come in the numbers anticipated, "I suspect it won’t take very long for this to have a big impact on the organization and the membership."

ASU’s Penley, who also is 1999-2000 vice president-president-elect of AACSB, said that he is urging people who question the organization’s expansion into international peer review to volunteer to participate on peer review teams, or get on committees engaged with international activities so they can make an assessment of its value close up.

For Kraft, the rationale for internationalizing accreditation not only is to obtain the direct benefits, but also to remain globally competitive.

"If someone thinks that by barring entry we are going to reduce competition—that is not going to happen," Kraft said. "European schools are going to become more aggressive in trying to attract U.S. nationals. More U.S. students will go there because as we become more global, people will put a value on getting a degree from a global school. Whether it is housed in the U.S., Japan or Europe is going to be inconsequential."

Efmd’s (the European Fund for Management Development) implementation of its European Quality Improvement System (EQUIS) accreditation program, and the United Kingdom’s Association for Master’s in Business Administration (AMBA) are two other organizations that also are accrediting business schools. "All are trying to extend their reach globally," Kraft said.

During the initial visit by AACSB’s team at Warwick, AMBA also was conducting a re-accreditation visit. USF’s Williams, on the visiting team, said parallel accreditation processes were "seamless." The issues both teams dealt with were the same, although AMBA only deals with the MBA program. "It saved the school an enormous amount of work to have the visit at the same time. Filing similar, although separate, self-evaluations probably saved them hundreds of hours," said Williams.

Warwick also is going through the efmd accreditation process for the first time. "I think down the road, if people are going to represent themselves as global business schools, they are going to seek these multiple accrediting alliances," Kraft said.

The appetite for accreditation definitely is whetted by the global competition.

"We could probably go on happily without AACSB accreditation in our domestic markets for quite some time," AGSM’s Whittred said. "But around 50 percent of students come to us and to the Melbourne Business School for full-time study directly from offshore, a large proportion from Asia. Those students search the globe looking for MBA programs, so we see ourselves competing with the major business schools everywhere. Students understand what AACSB accreditation means, and so, whether we want to do it for our domestic market or not, the point is, to compete we need to be globally accredited."

HKUST is another institution using the accreditation process as a part of its competitive strategy. It is committed to move to a more elite level among business schools, said Randy Westerfield, business dean at the University of Southern California and chair of the peer review team. The Asian culture does not value MBAs from Asian universities as highly as those from the West, and consequently there is a huge disparity in starting salaries.

"Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is partnering with Northwestern’s Kellogg in an executive MBA program. They definitely want to leverage off of Kellogg’s credibility to build up their own," Westerfield said. "Their strategy of getting AACSB accreditation is absolutely rock solid and partnering with Kellogg is rock solid."

A more long-term benefit of international accreditation is that schools around the world can be in a common dialogue regarding what constitutes quality and continuous improvement.

"The role of accreditation is to improve the quality of education globally," Gould said. "The more players we bring to the table and the more institutions that achieve accreditation, the better we can reach that goal of improving business higher education around the globe. You may lose some competitive advantage in that, but what is really happening is higher education is being strengthened and it is going to strengthen your program as well, as you compete in that environment," he said. "Global perspectives will be present in discussions much more readily as member schools outside the U.S. and Canada become part of the committees and teams and task forces of the organization. This participation is a natural fall-out of international accreditation."

"The impact of international peer review on the internationalization of U.S. schools is huge," Penley said. "Because of the centrality of accreditation and the peer review process to AACSB, the inclusion of these schools is going to mean we will have many, many more non-U.S. institutions that are accredited and active participants in the deliberations of AACSB," he said. "You already can see this on the BAC and on the board of directors. Participation of non-U.S. members colors the decision-making process and, I believe, the outcomes."

Gary Sundem, chair of the accounting department at the University of Washington, and vice chair of the visiting team and accounting advisor for HKUST, believes the networks set up during the activities of international accreditation are vital. "Some might doubt the benefit that comes from that, but most deans recognize the value of having representatives of international schools as active participants in our annual meetings, and other meetings," Sundem said. "They realize that those contacts in the long run are going to be critical to the success of any business school. You can’t be isolated and succeed in today’s environment."

Resolving Concerns
A question put to many of the people who have been closely involved in the first phase of the international peer review process was whether they have experienced resistance from other U.S. members.

Seybolt said he had heard there was resistance but when he went to the Western deans meetings, he didn’t see it. "There was resistance because they didn’t know what was going on. As soon as the dialogue began, we had 70 deans having a lively and positive discussion," Seybolt said.

"When I went to the Southwestern meeting, the same thing happened," he said. "I think any resistance comes out of not knowing, and probably some saying AACSB is spreading itself too thin. But the fact is, if we are to be the International Association for Management Education, we don’t have a choice."

USF’s Williams said he thinks members who are concerned have not had an opportunity to really look at enough of the institutions being accredited. "There are some lower-quality institutions that are out there, but certainly none of the institutions we have looked at to this point would be anything but what we would call high quality institutions. I found myself envious of the schools because I thought they were doing such a terrific job. I think all it is going to take is more experience because those of us who have been involved with it have absolutely no reservations about it," he said.

There are and will be concerns among some about international accreditation, Kraft acknowledged, because outside the U.S. there are so many different models for business schools. "Over time, the standards will have to be not diluted, but adjusted to reflect the fact that there are schools entering this process that are high quality schools but that do not look like U.S. schools," he said. "If we are going to be an international organization, we have to look like it and we have to be able to effectively produce a process and a set of standards and criteria that allow the best business programs internationally to be an accredited part of our organization."

Gould seconded Kraft’s prediction. "If there is any tension that develops it will be in the application of the standards that have been developed for North American schools, and how they should be interpreted around the world in different cultures and different educational systems and economies," he said. "It is a question of having the standards flexible enough, and right now the standards we created were not designed with that in mind." The need for flexibility and adaptation is going to emerge even more dramatically, Kraft believes, as AACSB’s accreditation process moves into non-degree programs, distance education and Internet degrees. "We are moving into an era where a lot of things are going to change, not only internationally, but domestically as well."

A road that circles the globe carries learning both ways.