Julio Urgel, Director of EQUIS (European Quality Improvement System)
Santiago Iñiguez's comment on new accreditation schemes provides an excellent occasion for me to contribute to this extremely interesting blog for the first time. The convenience of having the possibility to choose from different accreditation systems, each of which struggles to provide better overall contributions than the rest, is as desirable as for any other good or service. Can you imagine a world with just an auditing company? No need to describe the situation, right? The possibility of choice is always better than its opposite.
Tags(clickable): EQUIS , accreditation, Julio Urgel, AACSB
It is thus clear to me that the price that business schools pay for facing multiple accreditation schemes is more than acceptable when compared to the price of facing just one. Monopolies, as we know, end up imposing artificially high costs. I am not talking now about the fees involved in getting accreditation. I am talking about the price of having your business school strategy monopolistically shaped by a single accreditation system and its very likely unchallenged quality criteria and standards.
Of course, the presence of several accreditation systems will cause competition among them. Certainly, this competition is unlikely to be based on cost advantages. It is more likely going to be based on differentiation. As a consequence, accreditation systems should make an effort to provide different contributions to schools even if the core of its accrediting processes and criteria are roughly similar.
It is now up to each business school itself to decide whether the values contributed by the different accreditation systems are complementary enough in any sense, and therefore the School benefits from getting several accreditations. This would be the case, for example, for a School that is convinced that EQUIS will enhance its reputation in Europe and AACSB will enhance it in the USA. Incidentally, I am not sure that AACSB or EQUIS would necessarily agree with that view since both believe to contribute global recognition despite their respective origins. It is just an example. In some other cases, a School may conclude that the values provided by a given system are basically covered by another that provides even more. In this case, this School simply need to go for the latter. This may be the case, for example when a School has to decide between a national or an international accreditation, or between one that acknowledges sufficiency to perform versus another that acknowledges excellence.
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