AACSB vs ACBSP schools - Which would you choose for your (graduate) studies?

AACSB is the gold standard accreditation for business programs with or without CHEA's recognition. In academia, most business faculty positions prefer Ph.D's and DBA's from AACSB schools.

 

A gold standard for what. An RA MBA should suffice in most cases. AACSB has reached it limits in North America. now it is courting corrupt third world countries where it will exasperates problems for poor people trying to get an education. The corrupt ruling and colonial class already have access to the best education in their respective countries . AACSB is a marketing tool not an education tool.

 

AACSB is about the percentage of faculty who are putting out the pubs and schools producing continuing improvement plans that they then allegedly implement. Is it about the quality of education as far as students are concerned? At best indirectly, under the theory that faculty who are on top of developments in their field do a better job of educating--uh, maybe they do, maybe don't, haven't seen any research that demonstrates faculty who produce top-flight pubs in A journals do a better job of anything that directly affects student outcomes. I say this as one who teaches at an AACSB-accredited b-school who has taken part in preparing for the AACSB inquisitors to sweep through.

Frankly, I have yet to see any benefit other than "We have to stay AACSB-accredited because that's the gold standard". Of course, it is the gold standard in the U.S. and Canada, without doubt, but at the end of the day, is there any legitimate value added other than perception that it's the gold standard? As Stephen Hawking would say "It's turtles all the way down."

 

I'll admit that I spend virtually no time at all looking at MBA programs but my casual knowledge is that there are a lot of AACSB programs/schools around. Some of them are relatively inexpensive and so if it was important to someone to have that kind of professional accreditation then it's probably not that hard to do. If I was ever going to earn an MBA (don't hold your breath) then I'd be more interested in a Entrepreneurship concentration. In that case I'm not sure how AACSB accreditation would be a tangible benefit. If I worked for a company that paid a small education al benefit I'd consider a UPeople MBA and be happy to walk away with a nice little "check the box" grad credential in business.

 

And IACBE on outcomes. Sounds good.

 

Whether we think there is a difference in quality or not, AACSB is the gold standard and will remain the gold standard since it is more difficult to obtain, and all the top business schools are going to go for AACSB. Even Johns Hopkins finally earned AACSB accreditation. They didn't go for ACBSP or IACBE. If you have an AACSB-accredited degree, then you can teach at just about any business school not counting the constraints of the ranking system. An ACBSP or IACBE-accredited degree may not be enough to teach at an AACSB-accredited school. There are some federal jobs that require a degree from an AACSB or ACBSP-accredited program, and I don't think that will change. I don't think they will all of a sudden favor IACBE over AACSB just because IACBE is recognized by CHEA and AACSB isn't. The same applies to accountancy boards. They're still going to favor AACSB over IACBE despite the lack of CHEA recognition.

CHEA recognition is probably not as important as one might think when it comes to programmatic accreditation or academic memberships. The top international relations schools are members of APSIA which is not a recognized accreditor. If you look at jobs for school psychologists, you'll see APA and NASP accreditation mentioned, but NASP is not recognized by CHEA yet. NASPAA didn't have CHEA recognition for a long time, but was and still remains the gold standard for public policy, public affairs, and public administration. I know the OP was looking at Hodges because their public administration program is accredited by IACBE, but really no one cares because NASPAA is what matters.

 

I don't deny a word of it, it's true.

But I still wonder about the process and the value added and whether or not it's all just a load of manure. My wife went to one of those expensive, highly selective liberal arts colleges for undergrad. She studied the hard sciences, so she doesn't have a dog in the AACSB fight, but her dad was a prof there at the B-school and it was "only" ACBSP-accredited because they can't pay biz profs the $100K+ that the market commands for PhDs in the field, so their AQ rating's too low for AACSB (or whatever they call "AQ" now, just about the time you're learning their nomenclature, the AACSB changes it). Profs there teach for the love of it, or as a retirement thing after a career where they laid some money aside. And their students typically go on to great careers because the school has some genuine panache and the professors really care about them and set them up with great contacts. I was at a conference a couple years ago and met a prof who taught at a university near where my father-in-law taught, and when I told him about the school, he said "Oh yeah, sure, X College, they have great CPA pass rates, best in our region." So I doubt those kids blowing the CPA away are too concerned that their favorite prof doesn't have a half dozen hits in A journals or "just" has two masters and 25 years F500 experience rather than being a 28 year old dingbat with a fresh PhD.

So based on my anecdotal experience, seems that little Liberal Arts U kicks my AACSB-accredited 25,000+ State U's butt in terms of reputation of graduates and success in the marketplace, and I have to wonder whether we really get value from all the hoops the AACSB makes us jump through and whether the panic around here every five years to slavishly do whatever the master tells us to do is worth it--including, in one egregious case, laying off several solid instructors because they caused our AQ/PQ percentages to dip too low. Laying those people off did absolutely ZERO for the health of this institution and in fact caused a lot of hard feelings among students who loved those instructors (because they actually cared about teaching rather than hard core research) and tenured faculty who had spouses unceremoniously dumped from academic positions they'd filled with distinction. Seems like the tail wagged the dog there, and all to fulfill someone's idea of what the ideal institution should be--which is, I guess, having a huge PhD program from which you can extract slave labor to teach your sophomores and freshmen (even though they have no teaching experience going in and may be utterly clueless and incapable of teaching these kids because in some cases they're just earnest kids themselves who are vigorous hoop jumpers and want to get a PhD but are incompetent at relating to others or in other cases because they're brilliant but don't have a firm grasp of the English language), not allowing the actual profs to teach anyone until they reach junior level, and putting profs on a rat wheel where either they get several hits in big journals before they come up for review in five years or they get cut loose. None of this, of course, tends to make the educational experience for actual students any better in any way--at least in this academic's opinion.

Frankly, I think the world would be a better place if more institutions were like Heriot-Watt/EBS and told the AACSB what they can do with their standards.