Does university accreditation spur innovation?

As costs for higher education skyrocket and enrollments in graduate-level business programs level off, business schools face an urgent need to remake themselves. They must consider not just devising alternative delivery formats, but also revamping cost structures, staffing systems and other traditional aspects of the existing business model that make education almost unaffordable. In so doing, they could lead the way for change throughout higher education.
AACSB International – the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business – recognizes how critical innovation is to business education. In fact, its 2013 accreditation standards explicitly promote innovation. Even so, AACSB accreditation still does not truly encourage business schools to innovate in response to the disruptions reshaping the industry. But I believe accreditation practices could be revised enough to do just that.
I see two problems with today’s accreditation process. The first one is that, despite its new focus, AACSB accreditation fosters emulation, not radical innovation. Association members have a long history of learning from each other and absorbing the best practices of other schools.
Granted, AACSB’s new standards strongly promote differentiation among schools. The new category of “strategic management and innovation standards” demands that administrators make periodic reviews to ensure that they are allocating resources and achieving outcomes in ways that align with their missions.
These reviews lead to continual tweaks and upgrades. In fact, that’s true all across higher education. For instances, the ExCollege is an experimental cross-disciplinary unit within Tufts University in which students and faculty collaborate to expand the undergraduate curriculum in the arts, sciences and engineering. But innovation often occurs in separate units within the university so institutions can work around two powerful barriers: culture and governance. Higher education can’t afford simply to make incremental changes in small subunits any longer. Disruptions in our market will require us to reconfigure entire value networks. Currently, accreditation is not poised to help us do that.
The second problem with accreditation is that it’s inherently conservative. It exists, in part, to help consumers assess value in a market rife with information asymmetry. Education is not a “search good” – that is, consumers can’t judge the quality merely by looking at the product. Instead, it is what economists call a “credence good.”
Consumers have to trust that the college they choose will provide a quality educational service. Industries that sell credence goods can rely on their brands and reputations to win the trust of customers, or they can use accreditation to achieve the same end.
I believe there is a powerful way that accreditation can maintain its role as guarantor of quality, promote program differentiation and support true innovation: It can begin to accredit courses, not programs.
I’m not alone in this. David Bergeron, the former acting assistant secretary for postsecondary education at the U.S. Department of Education, and Steven Klinsky, a financier and philanthropist, recently wrote an article in Inside Higher Ed proposing that higher education accrediting bodies accredit specific courses.
This approach would fit brilliantly with the second purpose of accreditation: to support business development by facilitating reliable component standardization.
Organizations that set standards for components have an important place in history. The International Standardization Organization was born in 1947 to coordinate organizations that produced different components in technology-heavy industries. If AACSB pursued course-based accreditation, it could claim incontrovertibly that it is embracing the market disruption underway in higher education. Course-based accreditation would allow students to stop, slow down, or speed up their educational progress as needed. It would allow just-in-time education, in which students don’t pursue degrees so much as the information they need when they need it.
Course-based accreditation also would stimulate collaboration and differentiation among business schools. Business School A might concentrate its resources on developing a specialty in big data, for instance, while administrators at Business Schools B and C could focus on their own specializations.
Course-based accreditation is a logical extension of a plan proposed by Alice Stewart of North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, who won first place in the Graduate Management Admission Council’s Ideas to Innovation Challenge in 2011. She suggested “stackable knowledge units” that would allow master’s-level students to build educational plans that both fit their career interests and suit the needs of the market.
Until such measures become common, individual schools can take small steps to promote innovations. At my own institution, the Providence College School of Business, we took an empty, endowed chair and, instead of defining it around a discipline, we searched for a senior professor with experience in business-education innovation. We also have launched a Business Education Innovation Center.
Accreditation plays an important role in ensuring that the quality of higher education remains consistent and reliable. But “consistent” and “reliable” are not words generally associated with innovation. Business is evolving every day, and business education must evolve with it to retain relevance in the market. •


Sylvia Maxfield is dean of the Providence College School of Business.

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  1. Course based accreditation will be very difficult to implement due to the use of text books in the classroom. Innovation is virtually impossible when an instructor is required to use a text book. Therefore, the daily lessons to be taught should be computerized. The text material and other reading assignments should be computerized which would allow for unlimited student access on their smart phones. Built in audience response systems will allow each instructor to evaluate the effectiveness of each lesson. Innovative changes could be made on a daily basis and quickly evaluated. Overall course based accreditation could take place on a yearly basis and the business world would have computer access to what is working and what is not working at the college level.