AACSB Impact Forum

The College of Business at Tarleton State University is pushing to obtain accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the premier accrediting body for business schools. Before this process began, I knew that AACSB existed. I knew the general idea behind accreditation. But, I can honestly say that I did not know the degree to which they can drive value within a business school by helping to establish and maintain standards by which schools can first be measured and second, continuously improve.

As part of our push for accreditation, this last weekend, I attended one of their "Impact Forums" held at their international headquarters in Tampa Florida. They have identified impact as one of the three pillars of accreditation along with engagement and innovation. But impact is something that can be a little nebulous at times. After all, how do we know that our teaching is having real "impact"? Hence, the reason behind the forum.

So, what is "impact" and how does it apply to the college of business? Well, impact is pretty easy to define: to have a strong effect on something or someone. But, how does that apply to the college of business? Well, we want our teaching, research, and service to have impact. Of course, the assumption is that the impact is positive and hopefully it is.

Traditionally, as faculty, impact has been assessed by counting journal publications in peer reviewed journals and/or publications in high quality journals. Why? Because they are relatively easy to measure. But, we have to realize that impact has many different stakeholders. These might include faculty, staff, administrators, or the academy itself. Other stakeholders might include students, businesses, accrediting organizations, governing bodies, and so on.

So, we need to look at impact from a much broader perspective. Again, as it relates to research, while counting the number of peer reviewed journal publications a researcher had, additional impact information that might prove useful is whether or not other professors are using that work in their classes. Are businesses applying that research to their organization? That is real impact.

But, measuring such impact can prove difficult. Sometimes it takes considerable time for impact to be seen. For example, sometimes research can take more than a year to get published. Beyond that, such research must then be disseminated to various stakeholders for them to begin to be influenced by the results. Ultimately, it may be 2 or 3 years later or more before an impact can be measured. Even then, whether the impact is explicit or implicit can make measuring them difficult at best.

What about other kinds of impact though? Turns out, they are all around us. Some of them are quite easy to measure. We just need to rethink how we look at impact. For example, the number of degrees granted and student placement success (along with research quality and quantity) are the most commonly used impact metrics. These are followed by the number of consulting projects and applied research, rankings, surveys and feedback from key stakeholders, and community engagement and student projects. Finally, we have things like assurance of learning data, alumni engagement, and so on that can serve as representing impact.

So, the scope of impact is much broader than how it might have originally been interpreted. In academia, we impact all three areas: research, teaching, and service. The key is to recognize when we are having an impact and weaving it into a coherent story that helps us to tell our story as an institution.

With such a large potential scope of impact with which to tell our story, how do you know where to start? Start with your mission statement. It tells stakeholders what you value the most. If that is where your value is, that is where the focus of your impact measurements should be. For example, if you are a teaching school and you value innovative teaching, you should probably focus less on measuring and reporting the impact of research. That is not to say that research should be completely ignored. It just should not be "featured".

So, start with your mission and align appropriate metrics to assess impact. Identify what is impacted, by what, how, what the measures are, and how often they are to be measured. You are painting a road map here so that you can create repeatable results. In the end, this does not have to be a painful process. You do have openly and honestly reflect on your college. But, I think in the long run, it creates an environment for continuous improvement that keeps people engaged and excited about coming to work and doing great things!