How Visible Is Your School’s Impact?

• Student and faculty ratings can complement other evidence of a school’s impact by providing a view of how a school’s teaching, scholarship, and societal engagement are perceived.
• Lower ratings for engagement suggest that schools may need to make their work with societal stakeholders more visible and sustained.
• Comparing perception data with mission-specific outcomes can help schools identify blind spots and set priorities for improvement.

 
AACSB’s 2026 Global Standards for Business Education describe teaching, scholarship, and societal engagement as complementary dimensions of an integrated impact ecosystem rather than separate institutional functions. With this perspective in mind, the new standards put impact center stage.

The nine familiar standards remain, but they are now organized into three overarching sections: Strategic Management, Learner Success, and Pathways to Impact. The Pathways to Impact section brings together three areas: Teaching Effectiveness and Impact (Standard 7), Impact of Scholarship (Standard 8), and Societal Impact and Engagement (Standard 9).

This new architecture raises an important question: How can business schools generate systematic data that show how key stakeholders perceive their performance across all three areas?

The Positive Impact Rating for Business Schools (PIR) offers one source of such evidence. Positive societal impact has been at the foundation of the rating system since its inception in 2020. Drawing on student and faculty surveys, the PIR’s creators identified quantitative measures corresponding to Standards 7, 8, and 9. They then combined those metrics into a framework that provides a complementary quantitative stakeholder lens on the three Pathways to Impact.

The result is an assessment that rates stakeholder perceptions on a 1-to-10 scale. PIR results do not measure impact directly. Rather, they show how students and faculty perceive their schools’ efforts to achieve societal impact across teaching, scholarship, and engagement.

From Impact Ambitions to Stakeholder Evidence

Measuring impact is difficult. Schools can count the number of courses introduced, research papers published, partnerships established, community projects undertaken, or resources invested. Such information is useful, but activities and outputs do not necessarily demonstrate impact.

In its new standards, AACSB defines true impact as an effect that is meaningful, measurable, and sustained.  The association expects schools to use the three interconnected pathways to create value for academia, business, policy, and society.

AACSB does not prescribe how business schools should pursue, measure, or demonstrate impact. Instead, it provides an overarching framework that schools can apply according to their individual missions, contexts, and intended areas of impact.

No single group can observe every form or consequence of a school’s impact. However, when considered together, their perspectives provide a clearer picture.

Each stakeholder group experiences an institution’s impact-based efforts in different ways:

• Students have direct insight into teaching, curricula, learning experiences, and many forms of societal engagement.
• Faculty provide a different perspective on teaching and curricula and can additionally assess the research environment and scholarship.
• Alumni and employers can share their perceptions of graduate outcomes.
• Businesses, community organizations, and policy partners can contribute their views about the effects of research and engagement.

No single group can observe every form or consequence of a school’s impact. However, when considered together, their perspectives provide a clearer picture.

Experience with the previous Standard 9 suggests that societal impact was among the more challenging areas for schools to interpret, implement, and provide evidence to support. With impact now broadened across three interconnected Pathways to Impact, similar practical questions are likely to arise around Standards 7, 8, and 9 in their new presentation. The PIR offers a practical way to add systematic student and faculty feedback to this broader evidence base.

The Value of Measuring Perceptions of Impact

The PIR measures used here are based on specific survey questions. Respondents assess concrete aspects of their schools and their experiences of it. PIR survey questions reflect the concerns of each individual standard:

Standard 7 makes a clear distinction between teaching effectiveness and teaching impact. Teaching effectiveness concerns instructional quality and the learning experience. Teaching impact goes further, addressing the sustained influence of teaching beyond the immediate instructional setting.

The PIR captures perceptions of teaching effectiveness through students’ feedback on course design, teaching innovation, and support for continuous personal development. Teaching impact is reflected in their assessments of how well they have been prepared for sustainability challenges, whether they received adequate development in responsible leadership, and how many opportunities they have had to engage with business and societal stakeholders to create positive impact.

Standard 8 focuses on Impact of Scholarship by considering the quality and impact of a school’s research. Here, faculty must assess the degree to which their collective research engages stakeholders across the private, public, and third sectors and whether their research is assessed and rewarded for societal impact and relevance.

These measures do not establish that a particular research project changed policy or practice. Instead, they indicate how faculty perceive the institutional conditions that recognize impact and connect scholarship with external stakeholders.

There is value in interpreting perception data alongside other information and examining why different sources may tell different stories.

Standard 9 also looks at Impact of Scholarship, just through a different lens. Standard 1 establishes the school’s strategically chosen societal impact focus areas, aligned with its mission and strategy. Standard 9 then asks how curriculum, scholarship, and engagement advance these priorities and contribute to societal impact over time. The PIR adds an overarching measure of strategic societal orientation: the degree to which sustainability and societal engagement are perceived to be a driving force for the school.

Measures related to curriculum assess the integration of ethics, responsibility, and sustainability into courses; the application of methods and tools to address societal challenges; and the level of interaction societal stakeholders have in the learning experience. Measures related to scholarship assess whether the school’s research contributes to understanding societal challenges and involves stakeholders. Finally, measures related to engagement assess the level of a school’s co-creation with societal stakeholders, public engagement across the school community, and public recognition of that engagement.

Because the PIR is perception-based, the scores do not independently verify outcomes. Faculty may be assessing systems and practices in which they themselves participate, while students may have incomplete visibility into research, partnerships, or long-term effects. That said, there is value in interpreting perception data alongside other information and examining why different sources may tell different stories.

Applying the Framework

We recently conducted a collective examination of the 2026 PIR data, applying this framework across 87 participating business schools. Of these schools, 25 also completed the faculty survey. In total, the survey includes responses from 19,789 students and 1,189 faculty members.

In the table below, we have aggregated the 2026 PIR results into the dimensions and standards that make up AACSB’s new 2026 Global Standards.

PIR Evidence for AACSB Pathways to Impact	Students	Faculty
Teaching Effectiveness	7.8	8.0
Teaching Impact	7.9	8.0
Standard 7—Teaching Effectiveness and Impact	7.9	8.0
Standard 8—Impact of Scholarship	—	8.1
Strategic societal impact orientation	8.0	8.3
Curriculum	8.0	8.1
Scholarship	—	8.3
Engagement	7.8	7.9
Standard 9—Societal Impact and Engagement	7.9	8.1

Scholarship was assessed by faculty only. The student score for Standard 9 reflects Curriculum and Engagement.

Rather than averaging all survey questions, the calculation follows the broad architecture of the AACSB standards. As shown above, Teaching Effectiveness and Teaching Impact receive equal weight toward the rating for Standard 7, while Curriculum, Scholarship, and Engagement receive equal weight toward the rating for Standard 9. Standard 8 and the Scholarship component of Standard 9 are assessed only by faculty and have no student counterpart.

The participating schools are not a representative sample of all AACSB-accredited business schools, and the faculty results are based on the smaller subset of 25 schools completing the faculty survey. Because of these factors, these aggregate results are descriptive rather than statistically validated benchmarks. But even with these limitations, the patterns that emerge provide a useful snapshot of how stakeholders view the efforts of AACSB-accredited schools to generate impact.

Reading the Results

The aggregate results show a relatively strong and consistent pattern of stakeholder perceptions. For example, within Standard 7, students rate Teaching Impact slightly above Teaching Effectiveness, at 7.9 compared with 7.8, while faculty rate both at 8. The highest faculty scores appear within Standard 9, where Strategic Societal Impact Orientation and Scholarship both reach 8.3.

Engagement receives the lowest aggregate ratings among the Standard 9 dimensions for both students and faculty (7.8 and 7.9, respectively), below Curriculum (8 and 8.1 respectively). The ratings suggest that respondents view participating schools more favorably when it comes to articulating societal impact and embedding it in their curricula and scholarship than in making engagement with stakeholders visible to students and faculty.

Student and faculty perspectives are also closely aligned at the aggregate level. The largest difference is Strategic Societal Impact Orientation, at 8.3 for faculty and 8.0 for students. This may indicate that institutional commitment is more visible to faculty than to students.

While not statistically meaningful gaps, these differences can serve as prompts for interpretation and further discussion. The discrepancies represented in this global sample may be small, but they are often larger in the data for individual institutions. Any difference in perception is an opportunity for administrators and faculty to reflect and discuss how and whether the results might inform a school’s curriculum and efforts toward continuous improvement.

From Stakeholder Evidence to Continuous Improvement

The greatest value of stakeholder perception data lies in the questions they trigger. When the views of different audiences converge, the results can confirm an area of strength. Where they diverge, the discrepancy can make the case for a particular action. Differences in perceptions can indicate blind spots, communication gaps, missing resources or incentives, or incomplete implementation rather than simply inaccurate perceptions.

The appropriate response is not to correct a perception score, but to investigate what might explain it. Schools can involve students and faculty in interpreting the findings, using their feedback to help distinguish a performance gap from an issue of visibility, expectations, capacity, or implementation.

Schools can use students and faculty feedback to help distinguish a performance gap from an issue of visibility, expectations, capacity, or implementation.

The 2026 PIR Report also shows that evidence needs a route into decision-making. A practical improvement cycle includes discussing and interpreting the findings, selecting a small number of priorities, assigning responsibility and resources, communicating what will and will not change, and reviewing progress in the next cycle. Repeated measurement then becomes useful not merely because a score rises or falls, but because a school can examine whether intended changes have become visible in stakeholder experiences.

PIR findings should be considered alongside mission-specific outcomes and stakeholder-supplied evidence that a school uses to demonstrate impact in its own context. For Standard 9, that information should relate back to the societal impact focus areas that the school has strategically selected under Standard 1.

A Stakeholder Lens on Impact

As schools gather evidence of their impact, the PIR contributes a structured quantitative view of how students and faculty perceive impact across a school’s teaching, scholarship, and societal engagement. The bottom line is this: A school’s impact can be real and still poorly perceived. Or, it can be strongly perceived without sufficient proof of outcomes.

Both situations matter. The PIR makes one side of that relationship—stakeholder perceptions—visible in a systematic way. When schools place these perceptions alongside evidence of mission-specific outcomes and use discrepancies as questions rather than verdicts, the Pathways to Impact standards become a stronger basis for institutional learning and continuous improvement.

The authors invite those who would like to learn more about the PIR to reach out to them at [email protected].