What Does AACSB Accreditation Mean to You?

Transcript

Mark Thompson: [00:15] AACSB Accreditation provides a wonderful forum for faculty to come together and share insights and knowledge. It's this sharing that allows faculty to come back to the classroom and help train our students for the next generation.

Bill Nance: [00:32] AACSB's focus on continuous improvement helps ensure that we're able to better prepare our students for jobs of tomorrow.

[00:42] One of the key pillars of AACSB's approach is innovation. We take steps at our school to ensure that our professors and our students are involved in innovative, up to date, cutting edge programs and courses that help them prepare for whatever the world might bring their way in the future.

Ellen Durnin: [01:02] We're in the initial accreditation process, and we are doing things that we would never be doing if we were not in the process. We have created, for example, a business success center where students can find internships and job opportunities.

[01:17] We have created a professional development series where they're learning soft skills. That was as a result of my business advisory council telling us this is what employers want to have. This will give our students a competitive advantage.

[01:30] We've also created a student ambassador program. They are the leadership team of the School of Business, and they are now doing peer training to their fellow students. All of this is as a result of us going through the initial accreditation process.

Rajan Chandran: [01:43] The AACSB helps us a lot in terms of making sure we have a cutting edge curriculum. Especially in many areas, artificial intelligence is taking over a lot of what we do.

[01:56] One of the areas that the AACSB is helping us, and also will help us more in the future, is by making sure we have the content necessary to prepare students for the workplace of tomorrow.

Tomas Gomez Arias: [02:08] This is an excellent opportunity for us to share best practices with other AACSB-accredited schools about how to adapt to our own mission, how to best prepare our student population we have for the jobs of today and the future, and the ones that are going to come in the next few years.

Haifa Jamal Al Lail: [02:29] Effat University is a newly established institution in Saudi Arabia. It's a private nonprofit for females in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We are trying to offer the Saudi females opportunity that they never got before in the workforce.

[02:47] We are seeking now the international accreditation with AACSB. This will put them on, not only in the Saudi Arabian map, but also on the global map.

Jennifer Nightingale: [02:57] With accreditations, students are coming in and looking at schools that do have that accreditation status. [03:08] When you're starting to look at how it's preparing them even though the students, and some students will look at accreditation it's about us as facilitators, as universities, making sure that they have that continuous improvement in our programs. [03:25] That's what's going to make them competitive in the marketplace, and help prepare them for their careers. If we're not continuously improving our programs, we're doing them a complete disservice.

Emmanuel Omojokun: [03:36] AACSB has been very good to us. The fact that we said we want to go for AACSB Accreditation was a very, very nice thing to have taken up.

[03:49] Curriculum wise, we're able to develop better and quality curriculum for our students, which are very competitive. We have to go through and continuously improve the quality of our program every year.

[04:04] It has also enabled us to meet and talk with the industry, and we are able to create four industry advisory councils, one for each department.

[04:15] That has really helped us to engage with the industry, and they come to our classrooms to present. They hire our student for internships, and ultimately for a full-time job.

[04:28] We have been growing steadily in number of students because they go to our website. They see that we are AACSB accredited. They prefer to come to us than non-accredited schools.

Filmed September 2017 on site at AACSB's Annual Accreditation Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.