Photo credit: ISB Hyderabad by Chaitanya Gujjar
The Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad on Friday announced its accreditation by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), making it the first business school in South Asia to be recognised by the US-based prestigious accreditation agency.
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. The accreditation was coincidentally announced on the same day as ISB’s tenth anniversary.
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 Asias and Indias growth as the global management education hub.”
The accreditation will provide an external affirmation of the high quality of ISB’s programmes to MBA applicants, he added.
(Also read: AACSB accreditation forced us to measure our performance in teaching: ISB Hyderabad Dean)
“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.
The accreditation was preceded by four years of rigorous internal review, evaluation, and adjustment, added Mr Rangnekar. The AACSB accreditation process evaluates a school’s ability to deliver the claims made in its mission statement.
AACSB is widely considered to be the most rigorous 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).
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 the AACSB accreditation in the beginning of 2012. IIM Calcutta is said to be in talks with AACSB about accreditation, though the process of evaluation hasn’t begun yet.
In the immediate vicinity of India, all the three major b-schools in Singapore — National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University and Singapore Management University — have been AACSB accredited since a few years. As many as twelve b-schools in China and three in the United Arab Emirates are AACSB accredited.