MBA Accreditation

When it comes to MBA accreditation, you have more options than you think!

Accreditation is often misunderstood, and can be somewhat confusing. So it is important to define accreditation.

Accreditation is the certification that a school or program meets a prescribed academic standard.

It is the primary way that institutions assure quality and continuous improvement to students, potential employers, other schools, and the public in general.

Although accreditation is supposed to better ensure credit and degree transferability among institutions it is never guaranteed. It is always up to the receving college or university as to which credits or degrees it will accept.

Accrediting organizations perform two major types of accreditation - Institutional, which is for universities and colleges as a whole and Specialized, which is for specific units, schools, and programs within an institution.

• Institutional Accreditation - comes in one of two forms, either regional or national. Regional accreditation is more common because it has been around longer and is held by most major universities. National accreditation is more limited to vocational or trade schools.
• Specialized Accreditation - is also called professional or programmatic accreditation. This type of accreditation is also done at the institution level. However, it only "covers" the certain degrees and programs in the institution (such as business degrees).

An MBA program inherits both institutional and specialized accreditation from the institution. So, there are really two levels of accreditation available for MBA degrees. In other words, an MBA can hold institutional accreditation only or it can have both institutional and specialized accreditation. Therefore, when a school touts that they have an “accredited MBA”, you need scrutinize what they are saying.

It should be noted that MBA accreditation is not a ranking. However, there is a sort of pecking order that has evolved when it comes to MBA accreditation. This hierarchy or pecking order applies mostly to the academic world.

At the institutional level, regional accreditation seems to be better recognized. This is probably because the major schools out there hold this type of accreditation. At the specialized level, AACSB accreditation is the most renowned. So, an MBA from a regionally accredited university which also holds AACSB accreditation seems to be the best that it gets.