The Indian Business School, Hyderabad, announced its accreditation by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), US. ISB is the first business school in India to be accredited by the AACSB. With this accreditation, ISB now joins the exclusive league of 643 institutions in the world, including Harvard, Wharton and Yale in the US, besides select schools the world over.
AACSB, was set up in 1916 and its accreditation standards are used as the basis to evaluate the mission, operations, faculty, programmes, and other critical areas of a business school which applies for its accreditation. A globally recognised accreditation means that the school adheres to set standards in the delivery of education according to global best-practices. It also provides prospective students an opportunity to choose a school on the basis of the accreditations in addition to the programmes it offers.
"We always wanted to be a globally top-ranked school. We wanted to assure all stakeholders, our board, and people who made ISB happen that we are keeping up to the standards you had wanted us to. The process of qualifying for the accreditation required us to do a lot of internal streamlining, become mission driven, to quantify deliverables and have defined management processes," says Ajit Ragnekar, dean, ISB, on the rigorous process of receiving the accreditation whose groundwork has been ongoing for over four years.
Ragnekar says that one of the steps in the preparation for the accreditation was to define every attribute of the school. “It made us put an emphasis on processes, documentation, and our vision. When we said that we were a research-driven school, for example, we were asked to prove through our track-record that everything that the school does promotes research; and so on in every other attribute,” explains Ragnekar. Continuous improvement is the outcome of this process which will do a lot of good to the culture and the ethos of the institution, heopines. There will be a self-assessment that ISB will have to submit on a yearly basis to AACSB, in addition to a check that will be carried out by AACSB once every five years to ascertain that the school can remain accredited