Taking on the B-School Boys Club

Interest in business programs is growing at women's colleges, and a second one recently won AACSB accreditation. More are expected to follow

By Alison Damast

When Deborah Merrill-Sands became dean of Simmons College's School of Management in 2004, she quickly got to work on the school's effort to become accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). Obtaining accreditation was a crucial step for the women's college, which competes with several other accredited business schools in the crowded Boston education market. She wanted to counteract any perception that the school didn't offer as rigorous a curriculum as its coed neighbors. "I was concerned that some people may perceive it as a soft MBA or an MBA-lite and imbue it with certain gender stereotypes," she says. "By having the accreditation, that question is off the table."

Merrill-Sands' efforts have paid off. Simmons made history last year , becoming the first women's college in the world to receive AACSB accreditation, viewed by many in the management education world as the gold standard for B-school approval. Since the accreditation, enrollment in the school's MBA program has increased 20%, Simmons says. In January, another women's college, Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C., earned AACSB accreditation. Simmons and Merredith have entered an elite pool; just under 5%, or 579 of the 12,000 business schools worldwide, hold AACSB accreditation. One other women's college is planning to seek accreditation, according to Simmons. It declined to identify the school, which it is advising.

Simmons and Meredith are at the forefront of a movement within the women's college community to broaden their academic offerings. In recent years, many such colleges have started to expand their mission beyond the liberal arts and now offer degree programs in areas like business, engineering, and medicine. For example, Smith College recently became the first women's college to add an engineering track, while two others are adding pharmacology programs, according to the Women's College Coalition, an association in Hartford, Conn., that represents more than 50 women's colleges in the U.S. and Canada. "I think women's colleges, like all other colleges and universities, are looking very closely at a number of market-driven variables and making sure that their programs are reflecting the needs of what today's students are looking for," says Susan E. Lennon, executive director of the Women's College Coalition.

Growing Field

Business is one of the more rapidly growing fields at women's colleges. Currently 44 such schools offer a business management curriculum, according to the AACSB. John Fernandes, president of the accrediting body, says he expects that more of those to seek accreditation as demand from undergraduate and graduate students for business offerings continues to increase. Women make up a slowly growing portion of students in MBA programs overall, comprising 37.5% of all the student population at AACSB U.S. member business schools in 2009, up from 36.2% five years before. Meanwhile, at the undergraduate level, interest in business among women overall appears to be waning, with women making up 42.8% of the student population studying business at AACSB U.S. member schools, down from 44.7% five years earlier, according to AACSB.

"There is an increasing interest among women in business at these predominantly liberal arts schools," Fernandes says. "More women are looking at business careers, and certainly a business curriculum has become more of a necessity than it was 10 or 20 years ago."

Many women's college presidents are taking their mission to provide students with a top-quality business education more seriously. At Meredith, President Maureen Hartford says obtaining accreditation was a top priority when she arrived at the school 11 years ago. The school has had an MBA program for 25 years, but Hartford worried it was losing ground in the marketplace. Many of the college's neighboring schools, such as Duke University's Fuqua School of Business (Fuqua Full-Time MBA Profile), University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School (Kenan-Flagler Full-Time MBA Profile), and North Carolina State University's Jenkins Graduate School of Management (Jenkins Full-Time MBA Profile), already had AACSB accreditation, leaving Meredith at a disadvantage. "I felt that in order to be competitive here, we needed to ramp up our program," she says.

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