Some of the facts and complexities of the master’s of business administration (MBA) reaccreditation process have become lost in the controversy around the exercise.
First, some facts. It is not the government that carried out the MBA evaluation. The Council of Higher Education (CHE) is an independent statutory body with a Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC) that has the full legal authority to undertake programme accreditation.
The board of the HEQC has among its members individuals who come from the public and private sectors of higher education, and from employers. The board of the HEQC made the final decision on the MBAs, taking into account the recommendations of peer review panels composed of members who actually teach in MBA programmes in the country and have, in some cases, also served on international MBA review teams.
Now to some of the interpretations of the reaccreditation exercise that have appeared in the media:
- Some programmes were deaccredited because the HEQC prefers generalist over specialist MBAs. Although individual members of peer review panels may have had an opinion on this matter, the HEQC has no preference in this regard and the criteria do not specify anything on this issue.
Some generalist MBAs were deaccredited and some specialist MBAs were reaccredited. The programmes that lost their accreditation did so because of serious quality shortcomings in the key areas of teaching and learning and not because of their focus.
- Foreign providers lost accreditation because their “global standards” were not enough to satisfy the HEQC’s “narrow local standards”. The criteria of international accreditation systems were drawn upon in the construction of the HEQC’s criteria. International MBA experts commented on the draft criteria and participated in some of the site visits.
Of 13 criteria only two, those that focus on equity and representivity requirements and probe the registration of private providers with the Department of Education, reflect “local standards”. The rest deal with quality-related issues such as resourcing, staff capacity and availability, curriculum and research, among others, which matter in the definition of quality, irrespective of local or global context.
- With one stroke of a pen, the HEQC has struck down many MBA programmes and devastated the futures of many students. The impact on students in programmes that have not been accredited concerns the HEQC, which is committed to working with the Department of Education and the affected institutions to ensure that “pipeline” students complete their studies without further compromises.
Several options, including transfer arrangements and intervention to address the worst violations of minimum standards, are under discussion at the moment. There is no doubt, however, that negative perceptions will remain in relation to those programmes that have not been accredited and “pipeline” students will pay some price for this. However, the HEQC is not the villain of the piece. Poor quality devalues the MBA more than the HEQC attempt to bring quality to the forefront through its reaccreditation exercise.
All providers of MBAs were involved to some extent in a two-year consultative process during which they knew the evaluation criteria, and that one of the outcomes could be the withdrawal of accreditation. Some providers took steps to address the quality shortcomings in their programmes, while others did not.
- The HEQC thinks that MBAs are “lightweight” degrees and decided to close most of them down. The HEQC would not have mounted an expensive and comprehensive exercise in its first national review for a “reason” as educationally unjustifiable as this. The view of the HEQC is that the MBA is an important qualification that links higher-level study to the management and leadership needs of the public and private sectors in South Africa and abroad.
Its potential impact on economic productivity, on service delivery and on the development of a stratum of black and women professionals in management in South Africa makes its quality even more critical. Signing up hundreds of students without putting in place adequate academic safeguards is an opportunistic route for providers rather than a serious attempt to address the management challenges of the country.
- The reaccreditation exercise is the “nanny state” at work. The quality issue in MBA provision should have been left to the market to sort out. This is a rather simple-minded solution to a complex set of issues about the relationship between states and markets, especially in a country with a history of uneven quality provision such as ours.
The market had little to do with the dismantling of a racist higher education system, or in exposing the tacit assumption that all the qualifications offered by historically advantaged institutions are of high quality, and that all the qualifications offered by historically disadvantaged institutions are of lesser quality. The accreditation exercise has provided some yardstick by which to measure claims of this kind.
Governments in “market economies” such as the United Kingdom and the United States require higher-education institutions to be more transparent about academic outcomes, and more information to be made available to students, parents, employers and other stakeholders on the quality of programmes and qualifications.
Accreditation is a mechanism to make information available to students trying to distinguish between slick marketing and credible quality claims. Freedom of choice only makes sense on the basis of sufficient information and understanding of the issues at stake.
South Africa was experiencing a proliferation of MBAs claiming to be “a passport to a great future”. The personal and societal losses of these degrees would have been too great in the wait for the market to sort it out.
Issues such as employers’ perceptions of MBA graduates and the contribution of the MBA to society will be included in the final report on the quality of the MBA that the HEQC will release later this year.
Finally, the HEQC plans to work with different constituencies to encourage and support institutions to take primary responsibility for
improving the quality of higher education.
All the HEQC’s work is premised on the view that the achievement of greatly improved quality in higher education is the most powerful way of giving effect to the transformation objectives of equity, access and social responsiveness in higher education.
Dr Mala Singh is the executive director of the HEQC