Sid Craig School of Business earns re-accreditation

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by Tom Uribes

The Sid Craig School of Business earned a nine-year renewal of accreditation last month from the International Association for Management Education.

"Other than medical schools, accreditation of business schools is one of the toughest accreditations to earn," said Dr. Fred Evans, dean. "This achievement underscores the quality of the business program Fresno State offers."

Accreditation of the school's baccalaureate and master's degree programs in business was reaffirmed in a March 5 memo to Evans from the I.A.M.E., a national accrediting agency for bachelor's, master's and doctoral degree programs in business administration and accounting.

The accreditation review, conducted by a team of business school peers, cited five particular strengths in the Sid Craig School of Business:

• outreach activities carried out through the school's various units such as the Small Business Development Center, the Institute for the Development of Entrepreneurial Action, the Family Business Center, and the Business Incubator;
• broad participation of the faculty in the CSB governance process;
• comprehensiveness of the school's international activities, which enhance teaching and faculty development;
• significant expansions in the number of students participating in the student internship program in the past two years; and,
• the Craig Scholars Program provided by the Craig Endowment.

The report also suggested a handful of short and long-range improvements such as clarity of the relative importance of teaching, intellectual contributions, and service in the school's mission and vision; a formalized process for faculty to tailor their individual contributions to teaching, intellectual contributions, and service; and a process that benchmarks the school's computer resources relative to external comparator groups in support of its vision to achieve national prominence as an applied business program.

Evans said the school and its programs have long been held in high esteem in academia. Accreditation was first awarded to Fresno State in 1959, when it became only the third public institution in California to be nationally accredited by the agency, preceded by the UC campuses in Berkeley and Los Angeles. The Craig School is the only business program in the Central Valley accredited by the IAME. Of the nation's 1,300 business programs, just 352 are accredited.

"Accreditation by AACSB is an excellent indicator of high quality," said Evans. "Many business programs make achieving and maintaining accreditation as their primary goal. At the Craig School, we consider accreditation the minimum standard of quality, and most of our programs far exceed that standard."