<p>You're like a lot of people who had a BA (and even a MA) in something other than business (including finance and economics), worked for a few years and want to go to B school to change career. I agree that you are doing the best thing for yourself by going to UF.Usually the best bet for jobs is through the OCR (on campus recruiting). After some MBA working experience the name of the school will matter less and your work experience will count more.
Think very carefully about your long term career goals and only accept the type of job of which the experience will lead to your goals.</p>
<p>i agree that employers would care if harvard dropped its accreditation. If that happened, obviously something would seriously be wrong = questions, uncertainty, etc</p>
<p>
[quote]
I disagree with the hypothesis that if Harvard were to lose accreditation tomorrow the companies don't care. I bet they WOULD care. I bet the business school's applications would plummet dramatically. One can only cruise on your reputation so long, and if the standards are such that they lose accreditation, students(especially smart students) wise up quickly and the beneficiaries would be Stanford, Wharton, Sloan. The school can only be as good as the students and faculty it attracts. I am sure no one especially with the caliber and prestige of their faculty and students, wants to to be associated with an inferior product.
Consumers are smart, if a namebrand quality goes down, there will be other replacements.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yeah, but you're presuming that accreditation equates to quality. Look at the list of AACSB-accredited schools. There are a LOT of no-name schools there. </p>
<p>I highly highly doubt that applications would 'plummet'. Go ask any HBS student, past or present, if he has ever even heard of the AACSB, and odds are, they haven't. They aren't there for the accreditation. Heck, many faculty members at HBS have never heard of the AACSB either. </p>
<p>Basically, 3 things are happening. </p>
<h1>1 - Students at the top B-schools aren't really there for the ** education **. This is something that a lot of people don't realize, but it's true. They are there for the networking, the career services, and and the brand-name. The education for many (probably most) students is, frankly, a rather low-priority activity.</h1>
<h1>2 - What is accreditation for, from an economic standpoint? It is used as a market signal to provide assurance that the school is not a substandard institution. But Harvard ALREADY has such a market signal through its general brand name. So, frankly, Harvard doesn't really need the accreditation market signal.</h1>
<p>In fact, to digress, one of the biggest problems of any accreditation process is that it reduces innovation. Basically, it attempts to standardize all educational processes, thereby slowing schools from experimenting with new initiatives. So imagine this scenario. What if HBS were to radically change its curricula with a bunch of new educational techniques, but it didn't fit the accreditation bylaws? And that education were to prove to be extremely useful to budding new managers? Then this would be a case where accreditation would actually be a NEGATIVE. </p>
<p>The bottom line is that accreditation does not enforce quality. In fact, sometimes it actually enforces mediocrity. Come on, while I don't want to criticize other schools too much, but when places like Florida Gulf Coast University or Frostburg State University can become AACSB-accredited, it seems to me that the AACSB accreditation process doesn't really have that much to do with quality. </p>
<p>Here are the accreditation standards.</p>
<p>I'll give you a very simple example of a "standard" that may not be necessary. The very first standard calls for the B-school to have a Mission Statement. But why? Honestly, do you really NEED to have a mission statement to be a successful school? I can think of a school that has no "mission statement" that nevertheless were extremely successful. For example, back in the old days, no schools had "mission statements" (because the concept hadn't even been invented), yet were still great schools. I'm sure that, today, you could run an extremely high quality B-school that doesn't have a "mission statement". And looking at the business world, there are some companies that are highly successful that don't have a mission statement. And there are plenty of bad companies that have mission statements. Even Enron had a mission statement. So it's not clear to me that quality equates to having a mission statement. But according to AACSB rules, if you don't have a mission statement, then you can't be accredited. </p>
<p>So what if later academic research shows that mission statements are useless, and so HBS decides to drop its mission statement (as, right now, HBS does have one)? Then, according to the AACSB rules, HBS would no longer be accredited. But is that a bad thing or a good thing? I would actually argue that, if they can show that mission statements are useless, then dropping the mission statement is actually a good thing, even if that means losing accreditation. Again, like I said, the accreditation process does not always enforce quality. Sometimes it enforces mediocrity. In essence, it enforces the same standard on everybody, but that standard may not necessarily be a high standard. Sometimes the standards are low, and hence members are forced to comply with the lowest common denominator. </p>
<p>Which leads me to point #3: You don't really "need" accreditation to become a businessman. This is not like medicine or law. ANYBODY can become a businessman. Bill Gates is the greatest businessman of our generation, and he never even graduated from college at all. In fact, successful business usually implies BREAKING customs and doing certain things differently. If Bill Gates was doing the exact same thing as everybody else was doing, he'd be just a regular guy. His success came from the fact that he was willing to be DIFFERENT. </p>
<p>So the point is, because nobody needs an accredited degree (or even a degree at all) to become a highly successful businessman, it's not clear to me that business schools really need accreditation to succeed. Accreditation might be helpful to the no-name school, but I doubt it would hurt the top schools, just like not having a degree obviously didn't hurt Bill Gates.</p>
<p>
[quote]
i agree that employers would care if harvard dropped its accreditation. If that happened, obviously something would seriously be wrong = questions, uncertainty, etc
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yeah, there might be questions. There would be uncertainty. But come on, compared to the Harvard brand name? Please. Let's face it. Whether we like it or not, Harvard is Harvard. You have to keep in mind that accreditation does not always equate to quality. Sometimes it equates to mediocrity. Basically, a standardization process enforces the same rules on everybody, even when those rules are unnecessary. </p>
<p>Let me put it to you this way. Harvard has a huge brand name. But why? Because often times throughout history, Harvard has chosen to behave DIFFERENTLY than its peer schools. For example, when many schools, especially in the South, specifically barred African-Americans, Harvard actually admitted a few. Not a lot, but more than most other non-historically-black colleges did. This is how people like W.E.B. Dubois was able to get a degree from Harvard, but not from any white school in the South. Harvard was one of the very first of the established schools in the country to adopt the German-university system of large research labs and big research budgets, in defiance of the old tradition of the school being basically just a gentlemen's finishing school for rich WASPS - many of the first American non-Peace Nobel Prize winners were affiliated with Harvard. Harvard was one of the first schools to recognize the importance of the endowment and thus cull large donations from alumni. Harvard was one of the very first schools to engage in self-marketing and self-promotion, thus contributing to its current brand name.</p>
<p>The point is, the reason why Harvard is so prominent today is PRECISELY because it has dared to be different in many times in history. If Harvard were to have just done what everybody else did all the time, then Harvard would just be a regular school. </p>
<p>That's the problem of any accreditation/standardization process - it slows innovation. What if a school like Harvard determines that one of the standardization tenets is not useful? The school can either try to change the standardization process itself, which is a long political process with tremendous institutional inertia. Or it can forgo accreditation. Or it can continue to follow the tenet, even though it believes that it is bad to do so. In other words, accreditation does not always enforce quality. Sometimes it enforces mediocrity.</p>
<p>But the thing is, not everyone thinks like you, a very small percentage of people have the pedigree you do. So the lose will mean something to a large mass, whether from direct employment from the school, or for later jobs. Go and talk to an average joe, one that isnt retarded, yet isnt the brightest, but has the personality and drive to climb up the corporate chain to middle-high management. This is probably someone that isnt using data to analyze which school is better, which has the best faculty, what percentage of etc etc. Harvard equates to a good college which equates to you are smart. But being the average joe, so will the kid from UCD. It does matter, remember everyone doesnt think like you, many dont compare colleges from the standpoints that you take as they will always be questionable. However losing accreditation is a tangible action, something easier for the average joe to comprehend</p>
<p>
[quote]
The point is, the reason why Harvard is so prominent today is PRECISELY because it has dared to be different in many times in history.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>
[quote]
Let me put it to you this way. Harvard has a huge brand name. But why? Because often times throughout history, Harvard has chosen to behave DIFFERENTLY than its peer schools.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I think it is the other way around. Harvard is Harvard, not because it has chosen to behave differently; Harvard has chosen to behave differently because it is Harvard.</p>
<p>
[quote]
For example, if Harvard Business School were to somehow lose its accreditation tomorrow, I doubt that any employer would know or care.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>
[quote]
Go ask any HBS student, past or present, if he has ever even heard of the AACSB, and odds are, they haven't. They aren't there for the accreditation. Heck, many faculty members at HBS have never heard of the AACSB either.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I seriously beg to differ with those assertions. In my opinion most of HBS students have heard of AASCB. And the faculty? Even if they are from pure Economics or Psychology background, they have heard of AACSB.
How many EE or CS students are there at MIT who haven't heard of IEEE?</p>
<p>
[quote]
In fact, to digress, one of the biggest problems of any accreditation process is that it reduces innovation. Basically, it attempts to standardize all educational processes, thereby slowing schools from experimenting with new initiatives.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The whole point of accreditation process is to standardize innovation in a systematic way, not to hamper innovation. Of course it does standardize the educational process, but its intentions are not to slow down new initiatives; that could only be a an unintentional side effect.</p>
<p>
[quote]
So imagine this scenario. What if HBS were to radically change its curricula with a bunch of new educational techniques, but it didn't fit the accreditation bylaws? And that education were to prove to be extremely useful to budding new managers? Then this would be a case where accreditation would actually be a NEGATIVE.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Now imagine another scenario. If a no name Business School decides to radically change the traditional educational techniques; then in the absence of a proper accreditation authority, who would stop that? Harvard? No sir, a big name like Harvard doesn't give a damn to that school! If other schools get encouraged by the no name school's example and follow the suit; what a mess would that create!
It is just like not one is bigger than the law itself.
However big the Harvard brand name would become, it can never be bigger than the education itself.</p>
<p>accreditation for business is hardly necessary, for medicine yes, but business no, unless you wanted to only standadize the teaching of ethics</p>
<p>Sakky, perhaps you haven't heard about AACSB accreditation , then you assume nobody else has. I have, and I care. I counsel many students and if they tell me they are thinking of obtaining a certificate or a postgraduate degree from any school whose name I am not familiar with, I ALWAYS ask if the school is accredited. </p>
<p>If nobody actually checks to see if HSB is accredited , that's because it is ASSUMED that it is. I bet if HSB loses accreditation tomorrow, it will be HUGE news.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Students at the top B-schools aren't really there for the education . This is something that a lot of people don't realize, but it's true. They are there for the networking, the career services, and and the brand-name. The education for many (probably most) students is, frankly, a rather low-priority activity.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I would argue that there is a broad definition of "education", and that the activities you mention are indeed education. Every thing we do in life, actually, is education/a learning experience. Going to HBS will allow a person to mingle and get educated from a higher calibur student body (HBS handpicks those with the best experiences to share among other things--just read their student profiles <a href="http://www.hbs.edu/mba/profiles/stu_profiles.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.hbs.edu/mba/profiles/stu_profiles.html</a>) than most other b-schools.</p>
<p>As a side, AACSB does actually provide a stamp of approval on a b-school. Any school who is accredited by AACSB must meet these standards:</p>
<p>
[quote]
However losing accreditation is a tangible action, something easier for the average joe to comprehend
[/quote]
</p>
<p>
[quote]
I bet if HSB loses accreditation tomorrow, it will be HUGE news.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Maybe. But would HBS look good or bad? You know that HBS, with its supercharged marketing arm, would spin it in a way to make itself look good. Something like "We don't think that accreditation fits our goals, so we have decided to drop it", and then insinuate that they are leaving because they don't want to be associated with schools like Frostburg State or Florida Gulf Coast University. In essence, this would be a test of strength over who has better marketing, HBS, or the AACSB, and I think this is a battle that HBS would win easily. HBS leaving the AACSB would probably create more questions about the AACSB than about Harvard. People would be asking "If a premier school like Harvard decides that it doesn't really need the AACSB, then maybe the AACSB really isn't that meaningful". That's what happens when you have the strength and brand name of Harvard - you get to make your own rules. I agree that if Frostburg State were to drop accreditation, that would be painful for the reputation of Frostburg State. But if Harvard decided to drop accreditation? Frankly, I think that would do more damage to the reputation of the accreditation process than to the reputation of Harvard. </p>
<p>
[quote]
How many EE or CS students are there at MIT who haven't heard of IEEE?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Your analogy of the IEEE is not apt. That's because the IEEE is an actual professional organization that INDIVIDUALS join. But no INDIVIDUAL actually joins the AACSB. Hence, most individuals don't care about the AACSB. It is the business schools themselves who decide to join (or not join) the AACSB. </p>
<p>A more proper analogy is that very few people have actually heard of the company Applied Materials. But everybody has heard of Intel. That's because the company Applied Materials sells the fab equipment that consumer chipmakers like Intel use to make chips. No individual consumer actually buys anything from Applied Materials. After all, how many people want to buy a $3 million ion implanter? Only chip manufacturers care about buying these machines. As a regular consumer, all you care about is buying a microprocessor that works and is fast, and you don't care how it was made, as long as it works. The chip fab equipment used to make the microprocessor could have come from Applied Materials or Novellus or Lam Research or Tokyo Electron, or could have been created by magic, for all you care. You don't know, and you don't care. All you care about is that your processor works. </p>
<p>The same concept holds when you're talking a business school. All you, as an individual student, care about is that it works in the sense that it gets you the job that you want. Whether the business school is accredited by the AACSB or some other organization, or isn't accredited at all, you don't care, as long as you get the career that you want when you graduate. </p>
<p>Besides, let me put it to you this way. I will posit a question to the whole group. Pop quiz - how many of you can name the accreditation body of your undergrad school. Hey, no fair if you have to look it up. I want you to name the body off the top of your head. Most of you can't do it, right? I know I can't do it. I am fairly sure that my undergrad school is accredited by somebody, but by who? I haven't a clue. And I just asked this question to a bunch of people around me, and none of them could name the accreditation held by their undergrad school either. </p>
<p>
[quote]
I seriously beg to differ with those assertions. In my opinion most of HBS students have heard of AASCB. And the faculty? Even if they are from pure Economics or Psychology background, they have heard of AACSB.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I went and checked it out. I asked a bunch of HBS students and facullty in the last few hours whether they had ever heard of the AACSB. Not a SINGLE ONE did, and I asked about 15 people. </p>
<p>I don't think it's that surprising. I don't have a single clue what the schools that I have gotten degrees from hold as accreditations. Like I said, I strongly suspect that most people would fail my pop quiz that I posited above. I certainly failed. </p>
<p>
[quote]
I think it is the other way around. Harvard is Harvard, not because it has chosen to behave differently; Harvard has chosen to behave differently because it is Harvard.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>But you still have to ask yourself - how did Harvard achieve the prominent position that it holds now? Nobody ever got great at anything by doing what everybody else is doing. The way you become great is to do something different. That is how you create competitive advantage. You never create advantage by just doing what everybody else does. </p>
<p>
[quote]
The whole point of accreditation process is to standardize innovation in a systematic way, not to hamper innovation. Of course it does standardize the educational process, but its intentions are not to slow down new initiatives; that could only be a an unintentional side effect.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Whatever the intention is is not the issue. The issue is the EFFECT. You can intend to have good things happen, but nevertheless accomplish bad things. One of the main criticisms of standardization processes in general is that they tend to hamper innovation, because those members who don't want to innovate or are afraid that they won't be able to keep up will try to wield their political power to hamper others from innnovating by using the standards process to block the innovation from occurring. In a competitive process, if you cannot compete by out-innovating others, then you can still compete by preventing others from innovating. And that is what happens many times in many standards process. </p>
<p>You have to keep in mind that the standards process itself becomes an institution, and it is a truism that EVERY institution inevitably develops its own entrenched interests and hene resists change. This is not a knock at the standards processes in particular, but an observation of institutions in general. All institutions develop a form of institutional inertia where they engender a vested interest to defend the status quo. </p>
<p>
[quote]
Sakky, perhaps you haven't heard about AACSB accreditation , then you assume nobody else has. I have, and I care. I counsel many students and if they tell me they are thinking of obtaining a certificate or a postgraduate degree from any school whose name I am not familiar with, I ALWAYS ask if the school is accredited.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>See above. I haven't the slightest idea what accreditations my various schools hold. The people around me that I asked had no idea either. </p>
<p>Besides, you said it yourself - you said you would ask about accreditation ABOUT SCHOOLS YOU HAD NEVER HEARD OF. But honestly who has never heard of Harvard? Nor do I mean to single out Harvard. A bunch of other famous schools like MIT, Stanford, Yale, etc. fall into the same category. Frankly, you don't NEED to check the accreditation of these schools, because their brand names already tell you that they are good. And if you were to later find out that these schools didn't hold a particular accreditation, that would probably cause you to cast doubt on the value of the accreditation itself, rather than cast doubt on the value of the school. </p>
<p>And that's precisely what I am getting at. The truth is, the brand names of famous schools like this far surpass the fame of the various accreditating process. Let's face it. Harvard Business School is far more famous than the AACSB.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I went and checked it out. I asked a bunch of HBS students and facullty in the last few hours whether they had ever heard of the AACSB. Not a SINGLE ONE did, and I asked about 15 people.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Funny, I just checked it out myself too. Asked about 30 HBS students and faculty and everybody has heard of AACSB accreditation, felt it was important and said if Harvard lost it, they would not be associated with it. I asked about 10 students who attended Wharton undergraduate, they told me if Harvard is no longer an accredited school, no way will they waste their time and money to attend it.</p>
<p>
[quote]
And that's precisely what I am getting at. The truth is, the brand names of famous schools like this far surpass the fame of the various accreditating process. Let's face it. Harvard Business School is far more famous than the AACSB.
sakky is offline
[/quote]
</p>
<p>You've gone off topic. Our premise is NOT whether Harvard is more famous than AACSB. It is if Harvard lost accreditation, would it still have the cachet. And the answer is NO</p>
<p>
[quote]
Funny, I just checked it out myself too. Asked about 30 HBS students and faculty and everybody has heard of AACSB accreditation,
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Really? Would you like to provide some names of these HBS people so that I can ask them myself? I will happily provide you names of the people that I talked to. </p>
<p>
[quote]
You've gone off topic. Our premise is NOT whether Harvard is more famous than AACSB. It is if Harvard lost accreditation, would it still have the cachet. And the answer is NO
[/quote]
</p>
<p>No, I have NOT gone off-topic. I am arguing that Harvard is Harvard and thus, because of its brand name, can basically do whatever it wants. That's probably unfair, but that's the nature of the game. If Harvard were to drop accreditation, frankly, it is the AACSB that would lose cachet. </p>
<p>Let me give you an analogy. Both HBS and Wharton no longer actively participate in many business school rankings. Has that hurt those schools? Not really. It is because, frankly, schools of that caliber have the power to set their own rules. I agree that if a school like Frostburg State were to drop accreditation, it would lose out. But come on, Harvard? Seriously. </p>
<p>In the case of HBS vis-a-vis accreditation, you and I both know that it wouldn't be a case of "losing" accreditation. That's not the right word. It would be that Harvard would deliberately DROP accreditation. And then Harvard would run its marketing machine to tell the press why it felt that accreditation no longer fits its goals. For example, you would soon see articles in the New York Times, Businessweek, and the Wall Street Journal quoting Harvard officials as saying that the AACSB is not a useful tool, that it no longer fits Harvard's mission, and that Harvard will probably create "its own" accreditation body. Let's be perfectly honest about who would win this PR battle - Harvard, or the AACSB?</p>
<p>Since you did your nonscientific experiment first, you can provide names of the people you interviewed first. And give me some proof that you've spoken to them.......the whole list, (yea , I also have a Harvard Business school class list)
Sakky , I 've read enough of your posts to know what areas of expertise you may have, and what topics you are just bsing, and this is one of those topics you are just bsing. It is , after all, a hypothetical situation.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Would you like to provide some names of these HBS people so that I can ask them myself?
[/quote]
My D being one of them; she read some of your posts here and said "heck no".</p>
<p>As a Wharton MBA alum with many friends and colleagues who are HBS and Stanford GSB grads - I can tell you this is the first time I've ever heard of the AACSB (of course I assumed that Wharton's MBA program was affliated with some kind of accreditor of b-school programs - I never bothered to find out what it actually was nor would I have cared if somehow Wharton wasn't a part of it).</p>
<p>The fact that HBS, Stanford or Wharton are a part of the AACSB is just not a key determining factor as to why talented individuals apply there in the first place. If all three of these programs happened to "withdraw" from the AACSB, these programs would not skip a beat - nor would prospective employers care. Why? Because the AACSB has nothing to do with why they are interested in Stanford GSB, HBS and Wharton grads. They are there to recruit the best and the brightest, period. The best and the brightest don't apply there because these respective institutions have this rubber stamp "AACSB" attached to their programs, they apply there because these programs have developed and maintained the best reputations in the marketplace - the only acronym they care about is MBA.</p>
<p>Now, if one was to come out of a lesser known MBA program such as, Valdosta State University (not to pick on them, but I just glanced at the global list) - then maybe it would matter.</p>
<p>This is similar to the AAU:</p>
<p>Nearly all of the Ivies + Stanford, MIT, Duke, Hopkins and many of the elite publics (Cal, Michigan, UVA) are members.</p>
<p>But curiously - and here is the key point - one Ivy school is not: Dartmouth College is NOT a AAU member. But do you think that this hurts Dartmouth's ability to attract the best and the brightest students from across the country? When I graduated from Princeton, I had no idea what the AAU was nor do I care now (as I am sure that Dartmouth people don't care).</p>
<p>Here is a related article on the topic:</p>
<p>So, yeah, Dartmouth, Georgetown and other elite schools that don't happen to be AAU members could probably join at the drop of a hat, but do you think they care? If they did care or if the fact that they were non-AAU members negatively affected them in any way shape or form they would be lobbying to join in a heartbeat.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, AACSB? It only matters if you are going to a school that doesn't have a strong enough reputation to stand on its own merit.</p>
<p>So, what you are saying is that because i am going to U-Florida, it wouldn't matter if they were part of the AACSB. However, if i went to, say Keiser college, which isn't a member, it would matter?</p>
<p>Accreditation by and membership in an organization are very different things.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Since you did your nonscientific experiment first, you can provide names of the people you interviewed first. And give me some proof that you've spoken to them.......the whole list, (yea , I also have a Harvard Business school class list)
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Sure, I will. Once I clear it with them, I will PM you some names and you will be able to check them out yourself. </p>
<p>But I are you willing to reciprocate?</p>
<p>
[quote]
My D being one of them; she read some of your posts here and said "heck no".
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Give me her name, and let me verify her status as an alum.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Since you did your nonscientific experiment first, you can provide names of the people you interviewed first. And give me some proof that you've spoken to them.......the whole list, (yea , I also have a Harvard Business school class list) </p>
<p>Sure, I will. Once I clear it with them, I will PM you some names and you will be able to check them out yourself. </p>
<p>But I are you willing to reciprocate?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Darn, cbreeze, I see that you don't have PM or email as an option on your handle. So I have no way of transmitting information to you privately. How about you open up your handle? Or you can PM or email me.</p>