EQUIS Accreditation System Celebrates its 20th Anniversary | Luiss Business School

This year marks the 20^th anniversary of EQUIS – EFMD Quality Improvement System, launched two decades ago at the Deans and Directors General Conference at Schloss Gracht, now part of the ESMT Berlin.

This international quality benchmark and improvement process was created to give European and, subsequently, business schools worldwide, a rigorous tool to assess, certify and improve their quality in 10 key areas, including governance, programmes, students, faculty, research and, foremost, internationalisation, ethics, responsibility and sustainability as well as corporate engagement.

Since its establishment, a strong emphasis on internationalisation and corporate connections have been the differentiating points of the EQUIS business school accreditation system. Coupled with recently added ethics, responsibility and sustainability standards, they have created a solid framework for quality measurement for international business schools.

In 2015, LUISS Business School entered the élite of education having achieved this prestigious international certification, which acknowledges a limited number of Business Schools representing the 1% of managerial education.

“EQUIS is a way of celebrating excellence in diversity and I’m delighted to see how the EQUIS system and the accredited schools have evolved in these 20 years. There is no one harmonised definition of quality but there is an excellence benchmark and a striving for perfection in the continuous improvement process,” adds Eric Cornuel, EFMD’s Director General and CEO.

In its short history, EQUIS accreditation has become widely recognised by potential students, employers, the wider business education industry and the media as the most holistic and rigorous accreditation process, often being a pre-requisite for entry to rankings.

With an estimated number of 15,000 business schools worldwide, only a handful (167 institutions from 41 countries) hold the EQUIS quality label, LUISS Business School is honored to be part of 1% of leading business schools.

To commemorate this landmark achievement, EFMD plans to celebrate the success of EQUIS over the course of 2017 at EFMD events across the international community.

More than 10 deans and experts who have contributed to the development of the EQUIS accreditation system have given their voices to the value and role EQUIS has played in enhancing the quality of management education worldwide as well as the future development of the management education industry. Here is the video: