[Good Business] The tipping point of quality business education

Last January 23, Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International’s Geoff Perry (executive vice president for Asia-Pacific) and Hana Zainoldin (member engagement manager) visited De La Salle University (DLSU) to discuss quality business education and international accreditation.

What caught my attention was what happened next: DLSU hosted a gathering of Philippine business schools, then several institutions began to express interest in international membership and accreditation. Representatives from AACSB and Philippine Accrediting Association of Schools, Colleges and Universities (PAASCU) — the Philippine accrediting body — sat in the same room, exploring how global and local quality frameworks might work together.

Something is shifting. Perry summed it well: We might be entering a tipping point of quality business education. But how should we contextualize this?

Crises as catalyst

The Philippines faces pressures that are difficult to ignore. Governance failures and corruption issues dominate our national headlines. Questions about education quality persist. Regional neighbors are pulling ahead economically, and their universities are pulling ahead with them. 

I suspect we may be approaching an inflection point for Philippine business education. Or, more courageously, we must facilitate the tipping point for quality business education. Not because international accreditation is fashionable, but because the costs of mediocrity will tolerate or even facilitate the cancers of our society. When AACSB talks about quality, it uses three words to frame its philosophy: engagement, innovation, and impact. Of these, impact is the one that matters most for a country in crisis. And impact is where Philippine business schools have the most room to grow.

What impact actually means

“Impact” risks becoming the kind of word that sounds important but means nothing. Every institution claims it. Few can concretely demonstrate it.

The real question is simple: Can business schools show that we have changed anything? Not just produced graduates, but shaped how organizations behave, how communities develop, and how policy gets made. This is harder to measure than citation counts or journal rankings, which is precisely why most schools settle for easy-to-measure proxies. 

Philippine business schools could define impact differently. Graduates who build enterprises that create dignified employment, not just extract profit. Research that informs local government decisions or national economic policy. Programs that strengthen small and medium enterprises in the provinces, not only in Metro Manila. Faculty who contribute to public discourse, not just publish for tenure.

This is what “business as a force for good” could mean in practice: business education that produces people and knowledge aimed at actual Philippine problems. The country has no shortage of challenges. What it lacks are institutions willing to orient themselves toward solving them.

The faculty problem underneath

But here is another harsh reality we must face: quality business education requires quality faculty. And research productivity in Philippine business schools lags behind regional peers.

Many faculty publish in local conferences but not yet in internationally recognized outlets. Please don’t get me wrong, though — this is not about snobbery toward local scholarship. It is about whether Philippine business research participates in global conversations. Schools that want international accreditation will need faculty whose work meets international standards.

The harder question is structural: Is business school teaching sustainable and attractive as a career when industry pays multiples of academic salaries? Teaching loads in many Philippine institutions leave little time for research. Incentives often reward classroom hours over published scholarship. Support systems for faculty development remain uneven.

This is not an indictment of individual professors. Many work under conditions that make sustained research almost impossible. The issue is whether institutions are willing to invest in the conditions that scholarship requires: reduced teaching loads for productive researchers, funding for conference participation, and recognition systems that value intellectual contribution alongside teaching evaluations.

Some schools have started to act. Research chairs, publication incentives, and protected time for writing are emerging in a few institutions. Whether these remain exceptions or become standard will determine the trajectory of Philippine business education.

The regional benchmark

Meanwhile, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia have business schools with AACSB accreditation. In Perry’s report, Vietnam is at the same level as the Philippines, and without further gusto from us, Vietnam will begin to overtake us. Some hold the “triple crown” of AACSB, European Quality Improvement System, and Association of MBAs recognition. Only about 6% of business schools globally achieve AACSB accreditation. Philippine schools are underrepresented relative to our stated economic ambitions.

What allows regional peers to move faster? Government investment in higher education is part of it. Clearer national strategies for human capital development matter. But perhaps it is also a different conception of what business schools are for. If ASEAN integration means anything, Philippine graduates will compete directly with graduates from these institutions. The schools that prepare them need to be comparable.

In search of a distinctively Filipino response

The AACSB-PAASCU conversation is worth watching. Rather than a wholesale adoption of foreign frameworks, could Philippine schools develop an approach that bridges local accreditation standards with global expectations? The tipping point, if it comes, need not mean imitation. It could mean defining what quality looks like for Philippine conditions: engaged with local realities, innovative in response to local constraints, and impactful in ways that matter here.

Business schools that take this seriously could become institutional examples of the very thing they teach. If business can be a force for good, so can business education.

The interest expressed during the AACSB visit suggests an appetite for change. But appetite is not commitment. Conferences produce enthusiasm. Sustained effort produces outcomes.

The question now is whether this moment becomes a genuine turning point or another gathering that produced nothing but good intentions. The crises are real. The pressure is real. The opportunity to respond is here.

The tipping point of high-quality education demands that we steer businesses to be impactful forces for good. – Rappler.com

Patrick Adriel H. Aure, PhD (Patch) is the founding director of the PHINMA-DLSU Center for Business and Society, and associate professor at the Department of Management and Organization, Ramon V. del Rosario College of Business, De La Salle University.