AACSB accreditation and student demand

Abstract

We ask whether Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) accreditation has a meaningful impact on higher education admissions. To do this, we use the Synthetic control Method to explore 19 U.S. institutions which first achieved this certification recently. We, first, restrict attention to business school enrollment. While initial evidence suggests that the accreditation is associated with a decrease in enrollments, we show that this is complicated by non‐parallel trends prior to accreditation. Compared to their peers, institutions who seek out accreditation were experiencing flatter business enrollments. Correcting for the non‐parallel trends, we fail to find evidence that AACSB accreditation halts this negative undergraduate enrollment trend. We do find potential benefits to graduate business enrollment. Second, considering institution‐wide effects, we fail to find an impact on undergraduate applications, first‐year enrollment, price, or quality of the incoming student body.