MBA Program Receives Accreditation
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by Dick Lourie
Last month the College of Management (CM) received the welcome news that both its baccalaureate and master’s-level programs had received accreditation from AACSB-the International Association for Management Education, the premier accrediting body for management education. For the UMass Boston community, it is the second such piece of recent good news, following the reaccreditation of the doctoral program in clinical psychology.
With AACSB accreditation, according to Assistant Dean and MBA Program Director Daniel Robb, the College joins an elite group. Of the more than 1,400 management schools and programs in the United States, fewer than 400 are AACSB accredited. CM’s entry into this group is the culmination of a rigorous five-year evaluation process that began in the early 1990s when the College decided to seek accreditation.
Once accepted by AACSB as a candidate (a status not granted to every applicant), CM then submitted annual reports for five years, discussing all aspects of the College in great detail, and then a massive self study. The final step, an external peer review and site visit by a group of business school deans, led to the positive outcome.
Robb lists several categories on which the AACSB focuses its evaluation, and which the College also addressed in its self study: faculty resources; financial resources; curriculum; library and computing facilities; degree requirements; admissions; and intellectual climate. He says that in completing its analysis the accrediting committee looked at such things as the publication records of individual faculty members and the success of the College’s career planning and placement functions. The site visit included interviews with students as well as faculty. He has himself served on accreditation and evaluation committees but, he says, they were less rigorous, “nothing compared to the depth of the AACSB process.”
Robb said he was especially pleased for faculty members who had been with the College since its establishment in 1975. And clearly, for everyone at CM, the accreditation is both an exciting achievement and a guideline for the future. As CM Dean Philip Quaglieri put it in a recent letter to the College of Management community, “the real value of accreditation, though, is not in its achievement, but in its mandate to assure continuous improvement. We eagerly accept this mandate and will continue to frame our work with an agenda of excellence in management education.”