Standard 1: Strategic Planning
1.1. The school maintains a well-documented strategic plan, developed through a robust and collaborative planning process involving key stakeholder input. The plan informs the school on resource allocation priorities, including maintenance of sufficient high-quality faculty. The strategic plan is developed at the school level and reflects the school’s distinct mission and priorities, while remaining aligned with and supportive of the university’s stated strategic direction.
1.2. The strategic plan articulates a clear and focused mission for the school that contains distinguishing characteristics of the school’s essential identity. As the school carries out its mission, it embraces innovation as a key element of continuous improvement and as central to its mission.
1.3. The strategic plan identifies its chosen focus area(s) for making a positive impact on society through its curriculum, its production of intellectual contributions, and its external engagement activities consistent with Standard 9.
1.4. The school regularly monitors its progress against its planned strategies and expected outcomes and communicates its progress to key stakeholders. Ongoing assessment and refinement of the plan is regularly conducted. As part of monitoring, the school conducts formal risk analysis and has plans to mitigate identified major risks that may impair the school’s ability to maintain high-quality business education.
Standard 2: Physical, Digital, and Financial Resources
The school manages its
2.1. physical,
2.2. digital, and
2.3. financial resources
to sustain it on an ongoing basis and to promote a high-quality environment that fosters success of all participants in support of the school’s mission, strategies, and expected outcomes. Resource sufficiency is evaluated relative to the school’s mission, strategic priorities, learner populations served, pedagogical approaches, and delivery modalities, rather than by absolute scale or intensity of resources.
Standard 3: Faculty and Professional Staff Resources
3.1. Schools maintain and strategically deploy sufficient participating and supporting faculty who collectively demonstrate significant academic and professional engagement that supports high-quality outcomes consistent with school missions.
3.2. Faculty are qualified through initial academic or professional preparation and sustain currency and relevance appropriate to their classification, as follows: Scholarly Academic (SA), Practice Academic (PA), Scholarly Practitioner (SP), or Instructional Practitioner (IP). Maintenance of status requires meeting both engagement activities appropriate to the classification and the school’s established teaching effectiveness criteria. Faculty who do not meet both requirements are classified as Additional faculty (A).
3.3. Sufficient professional staff are available to ensure high-quality support for faculty and learners as appropriate.
3.4. Schools have well-documented and well-communicated processes to manage, develop, and support faculty and professional staff over the progression of their careers that are consistent with school missions, strategies, and expected outcomes.
Standard 4:Curriculum
4.1. Curricula are continuously renewed to reflect current and emerging business theories and practices, demonstrated innovation in design and delivery, and integrated insights from business research, evidence- informed practice, industry evolution, and societal trends. Curricula innovation ensures that learners are future-ready—equipped with the agility, creativity, and applied competencies required to lead in an environment transformed by technological and organizational change. Curricular content appropriately distinguishes competencies expected for bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree programs.
4.2. Schools manage curricula through assessment and other systematic review processes to ensure currency, relevance, and appropriate use of digital, analytical, and information technologies. Curricula are reviewed on a planned and consistent review cycle.
4.3. Curricula ensure that learners develop agility and an innovative mindset in adapting to evolving digital, analytical, and information technologies that shape business practice, preparing learners to be workforce-ready in a technology-forward environment. Curricula cultivate responsible and ethical use of technology, emphasizing human judgment, critical evaluation, and appropriate application rather than mastery of specific tools or platforms.
4.4. Curricula promote and foster innovation, experiential learning, and a lifelong learning mindset.
4.5. Curricula are informed by current research and scholarship, as well as other insights informed by evidence and practice, ensuring that learners benefit from contemporary understandings and discoveries in business. Faculty integrate relevant research findings and other credible sources of knowledge, including professional standards and industry innovation, into the learning experience to foster evidence- based comprehension and application.
4.6. Curricula are designed to promote meaningful engagement among learners, between learners and faculty, and between learners and the practice of business.
Standard 5: Assurance of Learning
5.1. Schools use well-documented assurance of learning (AoL) processes that include direct and indirect measures for ensuring the quality of all degree programs that are deemed in scope for accreditation purposes. Both direct and indirect measures are tied to clearly articulated learning competencies or objectives, as opposed to simple satisfaction measures. Results of AoL work inform and lead to curricular improvements.
5.2. Programs resulting in the same degree credential are structured and designed to ensure equivalence of high-quality outcomes regardless of location and modality of instructional delivery.
5.3. Microlearning credentials that are “stackable” or otherwise able to be combined into degree programs include appropriate processes to ensure high quality and continuous improvement.
5.4. Non-degree executive education that generates more than 5 percent of a school’s total annual revenue includes appropriate processes to ensure high quality and continuous improvement.
Standard 6: Learner Progression
6.1. Schools have policies and procedures for admissions, acceptance of transfer credit, academic progression toward degree completion, and support for career development that are clear, effective, consistently applied, and aligned with school mission, strategies, and expected outcomes.
6.2. Post-graduation success is consistent with school mission, strategies, and expected outcomes. Public disclosure of academic program quality supporting learner progression and post-graduation success occurs on a current and consistent basis.
Standard 7: Teaching Effectiveness and Impact
7.1. Schools have systematic, multimodal assessment processes for evaluating and continuously improving teaching effectiveness.
7.2. Schools have development activities in place to support faculty teaching effectiveness in all learning modalities and ensure that educators are adequately prepared to deliver curriculum that is current, relevant, forward-looking, globally oriented, innovative, and aligned with program competency goals.
7.3. Schools establish clear expectations for teaching impact (the sustained influence of teaching beyond the immediate instructional setting) and demonstrate how they measure, recognize, and reward faculty whose teaching contributes meaningfully to learner success and school missions over time.
Standard 8: Impact of Scholarship
8.1. Faculty collectively produce and disseminate high-quality, impactful intellectual contributions that, over time, develop into mission- consistent areas of thought leadership for the school.
8.2. Schools collaborate with a wide variety of external stakeholders to create and transfer credible, relevant, and timely knowledge that informs business theory, policy, and/or practice and contributes to mission-consistent areas of thought leadership for the school.
Standard 9: Societal Impact and Engagement
9.1. Schools identify one or more focus areas for their societal impact efforts, clearly articulate these in their strategic plans, and demonstrate alignment of resources and activities with their chosen area(s).
9.2. Curricula include program elements related to the chosen focus area(s), ensuring that learners develop the knowledge, skills, and mindset to contribute positively to society and that ultimately elevate the impact of teaching.
9.3. Schools produce scholarly work—basic, applied, and/or pedagogical—that demonstrably advances understanding, practice, or policy in their chosen societal impact area(s).
9.4. Schools demonstrate positive societal impact through purposeful engagement with internal and external stakeholders—such as industry, government, community organizations, and alumni—focused on their chosen societal impact area(s) and aligned with their missions, strategies, and expected outcomes.
