The EQUIS accreditation is conferred by EFMD, a global, non-profit, membership-driven organisation dedicated to management development and recognised globally as an accreditation body for business schools, business school programmes, and corporate universities. EQUIS is a comprehensive quality review system for the institutional level. Its rigorous peer-review process signals the school’s overall quality, viability and self-improvement commitment to students, employers and academic partners worldwide. Only 209 institutions hold the internationally acknowledged EQUIS label.

How does EQUIS accreditation work?

EQUIS accreditation may be obtained after an intense assessment in which all aspects of a faculty or business school are examined. These include the quality of the programme and the students, the level and relevance of the research, the quality of strategy and governance, the degree of internationalisation, the financial health and risk management, the orientation towards the national and international corporate world, and the attention paid to ethics and sustainability.

The outcome of the assessment process is one of the following: no accreditation, accreditation for three years (in which the school receives three improvement objectives – as was the case for FEB in 2014) or accreditation for five years (in which the school can set its own three development objectives – outcome for FEB in 2017).

Re-accreditation online visitation (11th – 14th October)

The online Peer Review Visit took place from 11 through 14 October. The PR Team consisted of three peers (the Dean of the Faculty of Business, Economics & Social Sciences of the University of Cologne, the Dean of the Faculty of Management, Economics and Informatics of the University of Zürich (chair), and the head of the Business School in the Faculty of Business and Law of the Open University ) as well as one representative from the corporate world.

The Peer Review Team conducted interviews with the different stakeholders of the school: the management team, including dean and vice deans, colleagues involved in the development and quality assurance of programmes and student support, representatives of the selected programme Master of Actuarial and Financial Engineering, governors of the KU Leuven (including rector and vice rector), financial management, research policy, professors (‘core’ and ‘adjunct’ faculty), students (from different programmes, origins and from all campuses), corporate relations and alumni. Via these interviews the team tried to get a better understanding of the context in which our school operates, our strategic objectives, the systems that are in place to achieve our objectives as well as our actual performance. They checked compliance with the EQUIS Standards and Criteria on the basis of our Self-Assessment Report, the interviews, and additional documentation provided.

Particular attention was given to the three development areas that FEB selected in 2017:

1. Internationalisation

2. Practice-oriented education in a research-based environment

3. Future Self (career ambitions) as instrument for programme development, study career consulting and (re)orientation.

At the end of the virtual visit, brief oral feedback was provided, highlighting strengths of the school (such as the quality of the core faculty, the research output and the links with the national world of practice in particular also for the MAFE programme) as well as room for improvement (such as the strategic planning process and strategy on Ethics, Responsibility and Sustainability and the quantity and diversity of the faculty).

We are expecting the decision of the Accreditation Board by the Christmas break. In the mean time we will receive a written report by the Chair of the Peer Review Team, leaving room for the Faculty to suggest corrections for factual errors.

Ingeborg Vandenbulcke

At the time this article was written, it was not yet certain whether our faculty would reobtain the EQUIS label. Meanwhile we received the good news that the Faculty of Economics and Business may carry the label for five more years! It will receive the accreditation for the third time in a row. This international recognition makes us as a faculty unique in Flanders. You can read the full press release here.