Instructional practitioner

Write criteria that demand current practice: ongoing consulting, a license that requires continuing education, a still-active operating role, documented executive teaching that is not the same three guest slides. Five years after a full-time move onto the faculty, “I used to be a controller” is a memoir, not a qualification file. AACSB allows a limited no-master’s exception when the professional record is deep enough. Use it for a rare expert.

IP counts toward the 90 percent qualified mix. It does not count toward the 40 percent SA floor. A professionally oriented part-time MBA can be heavy IP if participating-faculty sufficiency still holds and the SA floor is met in the unit and in each degree-granting discipline. Sufficiency (participating vs supporting) is a separate test from qualification (SA/PA/SP/IP). A person can be IP and supporting.

Example: 12 sections of intro accounting are taught by four retired CPAs on one-course contracts. They are IP if the school’s criteria treat current CPA licensure and annual CPE as professional engagement. They are supporting if they do not participate beyond the classroom. If those sections are 40 percent of the accounting discipline’s teaching, participating faculty in accounting may fall under the 60 percent discipline floor even though every instructor is “qualified.”

SP produces scholarship. IP does not have to. Additional (A) is the bucket for people who meet neither the school’s qualification criteria nor, under the 2026 language, the teaching-effectiveness-plus-engagement pair. An IP who stopped practicing and never built a scholarly record slides to Additional. Re-labeling them SP without publications is worse.

Question	IP	SP	Additional
Practice at hire	Substantial	Substantial	Irrelevant if current criteria fail
Scholarship	Not required	Required by class definition	Usually absent
Counts in 90% mix	Yes	Yes	No
Typical risk	Stale experience	Over-promised research	Silent growth of the A column

Yes. Qualification class and sufficiency class are independent. An IP who advises, sits on curriculum committees, and attends faculty meetings is participating. An IP who teaches one night course and leaves is supporting. AACSB wants participating faculty delivering at least 75 percent of teaching globally and 60 percent in each discipline, per the 2026 global standards text.

Normally yes, in a field related to teaching, plus substantial professional experience. AACSB’s 2020 language allows limited IP or SP status without a master’s when experience outweighs the missing degree. Document that exception at hire. Do not invent it during table-building the month before the visit.

It is a different class, not a junior rank. A school with a professional mission should want excellent IPs. The hierarchy that matters for the visit is the 40/90 math and whether students in each major actually see qualified, participating faculty. Snobbery about IPs does not fix an SA shortage.