An informed choice of MBA

An MBA is an expensive investment, even if you don't opt for a £20,000-£30,000 course at the top end of the market. So how can you make sure you get value for your investment and time and money, and come out with a worthwhile qualification?

League tables are one way of narrowing down your shortlist, but can be confusing. All measure slightly different things and have a global focus. This means that if you are looking at several UK schools, they may not even appear on the list. Accreditation – from the Association of MBAs, the Brussels-based Equis, or the American Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) – is perhaps the best consumer protection on offer, but is it a guarantee that the course will be up to scratch?

"It does act as a safety net," says Liz Walker, chairman of the Association of MBAs – the Association gives the thumbs up to less than a third of MBA programmes in the UK. "We have de-listed three schools in the last few years because we felt they no longer met our criteria. Concerns tend to be lack of student quality, such as not having sufficient expertise or qualifications, and in one case we felt the curriculum wasn't offering a broad enough range of subjects needed to justify accreditation."

Approval from the Association of MBAs takes up to five years, and dictates minimum standards for a wide range of factors, including high admissions criteria for students, a large and varied group, a wide curriculum and a sizeable faculty.

But even though getting this kind of kitemark is a rigorous process, accreditation isn't failsafe, warns Professor Leo Murray, outgoing dean of Cranfield School of Management. "Accreditation simply separates the possible from the completely impossible. Its main value is to act as a threshold. Neither accreditation nor rankings will guarantee that a school is the right one for you, because choosing a course is an emotional as well as an intellectual decision. While it offers a window on a school, no one should do an MBA at a school just because it's accredited."

There is always a political aspect to accreditation, he says. "Let's face it, if Harvard applied for accreditation, what are the chances that it would be turned down? There are very few hard and fast rules, and a lot does depend on reputation." Not that this is necessarily a bad thing – too rigorous an accreditation procedure can actually work against student interests, he points out. "If there are too many rules or criteria to fulfil, it can actually impede business schools from being innovative. In the US it was one of the reasons that American business schools went through a phase of being rather rigid and theoretical – the accreditation process there was all about playing it safe."

Good schools see it as a call to action, Murray believes. Gaining the Association of MBAs' seal of approval, for instance, is very expensive for a school in terms of time and money, and involves a great deal of documentation. "But it does put you into a situation of really evaluating what you're offering. It's a good opportunity for a school to kick itself in the rear."

So what can you do if you arrive on your course, expecting to undergo an enhancing and challenging experience, only to find that all the peers on your cohort are still in their twenties or almost fresh from their first degree, that the lecturers are only available half the time you expected, or that UK students are in a tiny minority and every conversation is fraught with language problems. Don't just swallow your disappointment, says Liz Walker – act on it!

"The first port of call is always to go to the university. It may be something that's easily resolved through discussion with the faculty, but occasionally it points to deeper problems."