21, Dec 2011

The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the prestigious US-based accreditation agency, has now included the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, in its list of accredited b-schools, making the ISB the first business school in South Asia to gain this distinction. The school joins 643 other b-schools across the world having the accreditation that is considered to be the most rigorous of all quality benchmarks in management education. AACSB is widely considered to be the best among the three highly influential management education accreditation bodies of the world — the other two being the European Quality Improvement System (EQUIS) and the Association of MBAs (AMBA). The AACSB accreditation process evaluates a school’s ability to deliver on claims made in its mission statement. The accreditation of ISB was preceded by four years of rigorous internal review, evaluation, and adjustment. The accreditation, ISB believes, will provide MBA applicants an external affirmation of the high quality of ISB’s programs.

On Friday the 16th of December, the ISB, marking its tenth anniversary, made this formally known to the public. In a press statement issued by the school, ISB Dean Ajit Rangnekar said, “We are confident that this recognition will translate into increased interest by the international community comprising of faculty, students and recruiters, and help us chart Asia’s and India’s growth as the global management education hub.” “The achievement further strengthens ISB’s mission to put India on the world map of top quality management education by consolidating our global position,” said Adi Godrej, Chairman, ISB in the press release.

At present, no Indian b-school apart from ISB has the AACSB accreditation. The Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) at Ahmedabad and Bangalore, however, both have the EQUIS accreditations. Whereas the programmes at IIM Lucknow; IIM Kozhikode;  Management  Development  Institute (MDI), Gurgaon; SP Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai; and Strathclyde SKIL Business School, Greater Noida have AMBA accreditations.

TA Pai Management Institute (TAPMI), Manipal is said to be in the final stages of AACSB evaluation and is expecting accreditation in early 2012. IIM Calcutta is said to be in talks with AACSB about accreditation, though the process of evaluation hasn’t begun yet.
All the three major b-schools in Singapore — National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, and Singapore Management University — have been AACSB accredited for some years now. As many as twelve b-schools in China and three in the United Arab Emirates are AACSB accredited.