Online MBA

The following is the first part of a discussion with Jerry Trapnell, the executive vice president and chief accreditation officer of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International (AACSB), a role he has held since 2004. A graduate of Clemson and Georgia, Trapnell has served and worked in the higher education field since the mid-80’s.

Trapnell spoke to onlineMBA.com about the importance of AACSB accreditation to MBA students, the growth of online degrees, and what the future holds, not only for online degree programs but also business schools in America.

What is accreditation?

Accreditation is a review of an institution’s practices and performance. In higher education, there are two levels of accreditation – institutional and specialization. The AACSB falls under the latter category.

“We’ve been doing business school accreditation since 1920 so we have a lot of experience. It is, in a fundamental way, a quality assurance process,” said executive vice president and chief accreditation officer Jerry Trapnell by phone.

Trapnell described the accreditation process as a continuous cycle of self-assessment against his organization’s standards leading to improvement in a school’s programs. Schools are put against a peer review “We review accredited schools on five-year cycles, so we come back every five years, to see where they are going, what they’ve done, how they’ve improved and so on.”

Institutional accreditation is typically done by a national or regional board. In the U.S. there are six regional accreditation centers. Who’s keeping tabs on the checkers? A national organization, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA.org), oversees higher education accrediting boards in the U.S.

A complete list of CHEA-approved accrediting organizations can be found at: http://chea.org/public_info/index.asp#who).

AACSB reviewers and accreditors don’t just simply go through a checklist and rubber stamp business schools.

“We look at a business school in its entirety – not something just attaching to one program,” Trapnell explained.

The schools are reviewed with a variety of criteria. According to Trapnell, schools must have a clearly articulated mission, focus area, and priorities. “We judge a school against that stated mission. Does it have sufficient resources to do those things, is it deploying those resources consistent with that mission, are they assessing progress and continuous improvement within the context of that mission. That’s a major opening component of our review.”

Secondly, b-schools are evaluated through faculty and students. The AACSB looks “at the students, faculty, faculty resources, support services for students, and (that) faculty are not only outstanding teachers, but outstanding scholars, and themselves deliver high quality, well-put together programs of study in support of their degree programs.”

Next the AACSB tackles the curricula from the content and consistency perspective, comparing it to other high-quality programs. Faculty are expected to be well qualified and engage students in an active business environment, “reflecting  really high level programming that that school is conducting at all levels,” Trapnell said.

“All of that comes into view and study as we look at schools and when we grant our accreditation, it represents a very strong and internationally recognized quality, focused on the business school,” Trapnell added.

Business schools voluntarily submit reviews to the AACSB, which currently accredits 673 637 business schools in 70 41 countries. The reviewers are also volunteers, business school deans, and other business professionals, and the AACSB employs between 400-500 of them annually to complete the process.

Tomorrow: What’s the accreditation process like for b-schools?

– Alanna Stage