Accreditation Council allows foreign agencies

Soon the Austrian Agency for Quality Assurance (AQA) from Vienna and the Center of Accreditation and Quality Assurance of the Swiss Universities (OAQ) from Bern will be authorized to conduct the procedure of system accreditation in Germany. The OAQ may also accredit individual programs of study.

The German Accreditation System is organized in a decentralized manner. The accreditation of programs or, as the case may be, of university-internal quality assurance systems is carried out by agencies, which in turn are authorized by the Accreditation Council. 

While only individual programs were accredited in Germany up to this point, now there is a move towards system accreditation. The quality system of the university, which the university itself uses to ensure the quality of its programs, is evaluated. Therefore, if a university possesses a system accreditation, then all of its programs are automatically accredited.

There has yet to be a system accreditation in Germany. In contrast, the Swiss OAQ can already look back on long-standing success. All ten universities in Switzerland and both Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Zurich (ETH) are reviewed as an institution by the OAQ. All that’s evaluated, however, is “whether institutions fulfill qualitative minimum requirements.” The OAQ also examines individual programs and can now do this in Germany as well. Merely minimum standards, however, are assured.
   
Up until now primarily the Foundation for International Business Administration Accreditation (Fibaa) has been active in the German-speaking realm of the MBA field. In addition to awarding the Accreditation Council’s seal of quality for programs at state-recognized universities, it also awards a seal of quality for other providers without university status. This means that even when an MBA program is accredited by Fibaa, the MBA is still hardly a recognized academic degree. This dual strategy continuously causes confusion and some MBA providers are happy to conceal it. 
   
But Fibaa itself is also causing confusion. Just recently on its website, it falsely designated the Austrian and Swiss programs which it itself had accredited as “state or state-recognized universities with the Accreditation Council’s seal of quality.” This gives the impression, for example, that the “Malik MZSG Master of Management,” which as a degree from a non-university continuing education institution has nothing to do with an academic degree, is a recognized Masters degree.
According to the Accreditation Council, the false information was an oversight by Fibaa that has since been corrected.

In any case, German accreditations don’t play a role in the international MBA market. The quality seals from AACSB, Equis or Amba are critical and are considered entrance tickets to the international top league.
   
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