News

Biz school still top-echelon

To remain one of 607 best institutions in world

By Chris Chase

Posted on Jan. 23, 2011, at 10:37 p.m.

The Maine Business School at the University of Maine has earned reaccreditation with the prestigious review body, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.

With this reaccreditation, the Maine Business School remains in a category comprised of less than 5 percent of business schools in the world qualified for accreditation under the standards set by AACSB International. As of December 2010, only 607 institutions representing 38 countries were AACSB accredited.

“[It] demonstrates this school meets the standards of the best business schools in the world,” said Violetta Urba, a senior accreditation manager for the AACSB. “The schools have to demonstrate a commitment to improvement in a number of different areas.”

Reaccreditation comes after a peer review and extensive analysis of the business school. The AACSB International board of directors, which conducts peer reviews, includes Stuart I. Feldman, a vice president of engineering at Google Inc., and Yingyi Qian, dean and professor of the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University, based in Beijing, China.

Although reaccreditation is not as lengthy as initial accreditation, it is still an extensive process.

“Maintenance is not so much starting from scratch, but maintaining continuous improvement,” Urba said. “The maintenance process answers that the school is continuing to meet the standards.”

The standards Urba referred to are a pastiche of 21 different areas that the school must fulfill to maintain accreditation, including staff sufficiency, faculty qualifications, student educational responsibility and others designed to ensure that the department, professors and students all meet the standards of AACSB International.

“It’s a long process,” said Jane Lawler, a manager of accreditation. “By the time schools reach the end of it, some schools drop out or withdraw.”

The Maine Business School first earned accreditation with AACSB International in 1974 and since then has consistently maintained it.

“The reaffirmed accreditation comes as no surprise. We have a number of faculty with national and indeed worldwide reputations as teachers and scholars,” Ivan Manev, dean of the Maine Business School, wrote in a statement released by the university. “The reaffirmed accreditation was a systematic and collective effort and reflects the hard work of all faculty and staff.”

Urba stressed the importance of accreditation for graduates of the university’s business program, as a degree from an institution recognized by AACSB International stands out on a job application.

“A number of companies only recruit from AACSB-accredited schools,” she said.

The announcement of the reaccreditation is only one of the business school’s accomplishments to make headlines recently. Last year, the U.S. News and World Report ranked the Maine Business School as one of the best in the country, an accomplishment noted by Manev.

“Our students learn the state of the art in business disciplines. Just this past spring, we were ranked in the top 20 percent on a national comprehensive exam for undergraduate students and in the top 15 percent for graduate students,” Manev wrote in a statement.

Additionally, the Maine Business School has been ranked as one of the 1,000 best of its kind in the world by Paris-based educational consulting firm Eduniversal.

UMaine will be officially recognized in April at the annual AACSB international conference in New York City.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 23rd, 2011, 10:37 pm. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.