Maintenance of accreditation

AACSB: annual Business School Questionnaire, mid-cycle CIR application, CIR report 60 days before the visit, peer-review visit, CIRC concurrence. EQUIS: a development plan plus re-evaluation every three to five years. EFMD Programme Accreditation: a shorter re-accreditation than the ~two-year initial path. IACBE: up to seven years, then renewal; educational membership alone is not the seal. All of them expect the school to keep the public statement of scope honest between visits.

Maintenance fails in the quiet years. Faculty qualifications decay. A new master’s launches unreported. AoL collects scores and never changes a course. The visit then looks like initial accreditation without a mentor. AACSB’s move to a six-year CIR cycle puts more weight on the mid-cycle application as an early-warning file. Ignore that file and the sixth year is a panic.

Example: a school accredited in 2021 is on the six-year transition chart. The next visit slides a year. Someone cancels the AoL committee “until the year before.” In year five the MBA competency data are two cycles old and the SA ratio is 34 percent. Maintenance did not fail at the visit. It failed when the committee was dissolved.

Initial answers “can this school enter and meet the standards?” Maintenance answers “did it keep improving against its mission and the last team’s concerns?” Different committees (IAC vs CIRC), different reports (SER vs CIR report), different tone (alignment climb vs consultative continuation). EQUIS uses one institutional scheme with a shorter re-review clock. Do not tell the board that “we are accredited, so we are done until 2031.”

Body	Continuation name	Published cadence
AACSB	Continuous improvement review (historically maintenance)	6 years (visits from 1 July 2026)
EQUIS	Re-evaluation / re-accreditation	3 or 5 years
IACBE	Renewal	Up to 7 years
EFMD Accredited	Re-accreditation	Shorter than the ~2-year initial process

CIR is the current process name. Maintenance of accreditation is the historical AACSB phrase and the generic term across bodies. Use CIR in AACSB correspondence. Use maintenance when you mean the continuation problem in any scheme, including EQUIS and IACBE.

Not in AACSB CIR. Mentors are an initial-accreditation resource. CIR schools sometimes hire consultants; that is optional and not an AACSB role. The peer-review team is not a mentor. Do not expect coaching in the exit interview.

Outcomes vary by body: extension with concerns, a shortened cycle, deferral, probation-style monitoring, or withdrawal. AACSB CIRC and the board, the EQUIS Accreditation Board, or IACBE’s Board of Commissioners make the call. Losing specialised business accreditation does not automatically kill Title IV, which rides on institutional accreditation. It does kill the logo.