Eligibility application

Schools open an eligibility inquiry, attend a mandatory EA workshop, and submit the application and profile through myAccreditation. Staff check completeness. The Eligibility Review Committee (for applications after 17 February 2025) decides whether to let the school into the initial pathway. AACSB’s handbook is blunt: likelihood of success inside the timeframe is part of the decision. On yes, a mentor and accreditation manager are assigned and invoices follow. On no, the school should not invent a visit date.

The EA is also where unit, programmatic scope, and exclusion requests first get serious. A messy org chart at eligibility becomes a logo problem at the visit. Accounting EAs can be concurrent with business or later; they cannot precede business accreditation.

Example: two faculties offer MBAs. The school files an EA as “the university” without a unit application and without listing the second MBA. ERC can still accept, and the second MBA is then in scope by default. Cleaning that up in year four, 60 days before a visit, is how CIRC (later) or IAC (now) spends a meeting on your file.

The EA asks “may this entity enter the process?” The iSER asks “where are we relative to the standards, and what is the plan?” EQUIS eligibility is a different gate: EFMD membership, ten years of operation, at least 25 FTE core faculty, management as the primary focus. Copying EQUIS’s 25 FTE sentence into an AACSB EA does not answer AACSB’s questions, and skipping it on an EQUIS datasheet fails EQUIS.

Gate	Body	What “yes” means
AACSB eligibility application	ERC, then IAC pathway	Enter initial accreditation with a mentor
AACSB iSER acceptance	IAC	Continue toward SER and a visit, or enter implementation
EQUIS eligibility	EQUIS Committee	Proceed toward self-assessment and EQUIS review

No. CIR schools already hold accreditation. They file a CIR application at mid-cycle, not an EA. The EA is an initial-accreditation artifact. Re-entry after a lapse or a new accounting overlay has its own AACSB instructions; do not reuse a ten-year-old EA PDF.

AACSB requires schools to attend an eligibility-application workshop before filing. It is process training: scope, tables, myAccreditation, what ERC reads. Skipping it is not a time saver. Staff will send the file back incomplete.

If the mentor sees no reasonable path to alignment in the remaining time, AACSB’s initial-accreditation page says the mentor will so advise. IAC can also keep a school in implementation or require iSER rewrites. Eligibility is permission to try, on a clock, not a reserved visit in year seven.