No part of higher education globalized faster or earlier than business schools. Long before internationalization became a strategic priority elsewhere, they were already exporting degrees, setting cross-border accreditation norms, and building a global marketplace for talent and ideas. Their standards, rankings, and quality frameworks reshaped the sector and elevated expectations worldwide.
Today, higher education stands at another inflection point. Societies are no longer satisfied with knowing what institutions produce-programs, publications, graduates. They want evidence of what those institutions change in the real world. Economic transformation, community well-being, talent retention, innovation adoption: these outcomes are increasingly seen as the true test of institutional value.
Business schools, with their corporate proximity, measurement culture, and agility, are uniquely positioned to lead this next shift. And once again, the sector needs them to step forward.
FROM PURPOSE TO IMPACT: WHY BUSINESS SCHOOLS MUST LEAD THE NEXT TRANSFORMATION IN HIGHER ED
Purpose is direction; impact is proof.
A generation ago, business schools reinvented higher education. They popularized the MBA, normalized international accreditation, and helped turn rankings into a global language for quality and transparency. That transformation elevated expectations and professionalized the sector. Rankings have since evolved to include dimensions such as sustainability and social impact, but a fundamental gap remains.
Rankings and accreditations rely overwhelmingly on self-declared outputs: what schools say they do, the programs they run, the research they publish, the students they enroll. These metrics are inward-facing. They describe institutional activity, not the consequences of that activity.
OUTPUTS AREN’T IMPACT
Impact is what people, firms, and communities become because a school exists. It is externally verified, not internally reported. It shows up in data the institution does not control.
Real impact is reflected in:
- Rising competitiveness and productivity in the local economy.
- Firms adopting innovation – better standards, smarter processes, higher value-added.
- Human capital that improves lives and strengthens organizational performance.
- Entrepreneurship that generates companies, jobs, and new economic pathways.
- Clusters that emerge around talent, research, and applied knowledge.
- A region’s growing international projection – retaining global graduates, attracting investment and research labs.
- Social progress: more inclusive, just, and sustainable communities.
These are not inputs or self-reported outputs. They are changes visible in wage data, firm growth, graduate retention, and the long-term vitality of a city or region.
CONTEXT MATTERS
Impact must be assessed relative to a specific territory – a city, metro area, region, or country – and interpreted against that territory’s needs and realities. Rankings cannot capture this nuance because they are global by design, while impact is inherently local.
A university can be genuinely high-impact without leading every output metric. Some excel at building strong talent pipelines; others transform local industries through applied research or anchor vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems. A school deeply embedded in its region – supporting SMEs, attracting expertise, driving innovation – may deliver far more meaningful change than one that performs well on global tables but remains disconnected from place.
PURPOSE WITHOUT PROOF IS JUST A SLOGAN
Purpose statements are abundant across higher education, but purpose only becomes credible when supported by evidence. If institutions do not measure the changes that matter to people and places, it becomes difficult to set priorities, rally partners, or defend funding.
Accreditation and rankings improved quality because they offered concrete targets. The next step is to measure impact with enough clarity to guide strategy – without pretending a single universal ROI can capture the full picture.
REPORTING IMPACT IS NOT YET STANDARD PRACTICE
A systematic search identified 62 territorial university impact reports published between 2010 and 2024. Thirty-eight were produced by individual universities, with the remainder coming from system-, regional-, or national-level studies. With more than 21,000 universities worldwide and around 3,000 appearing in rankings annually, the gap is striking.
We measure reputation far more intensely than we measure impact. Still, attention is growing, and recent years show a clear upward trend.
If institutions truly believe in their purpose, impact should feature in board-level conversations. Budgets, enrollment, and rankings matter, but without clear impact metrics, performance is evaluated almost entirely by internal production rather than external contribution.
WHY BUSINESS SCHOOLS MUST LEAD
Four structural advantages position business schools to drive this transformation:
- Proximity to firms through executive education, consulting, labs, and alumni networks.
- Visibility into talent flows via robust tracking of graduate employment outcomes.
- A culture of measurement developed through decades of accreditation and rankings.
- Agility in experimenting with curricula, partnerships, and applied projects.
Business schools already translate ideas into practice more quickly than most academic units. They are built to operationalize impact.
IMPERFECTION IS REASON FOR DELAY
Impact measurement will never be flawless, but the goal is alignment, not perfection. Early versions of accreditation and rankings were imperfect too, yet they catalyzed enormous improvements.
The imperative now is to ensure that purpose guides decisions and that institutions have shared evidence for steering change.
Many business schools are already doing elements of this work – developing regional partnerships, supporting entrepreneurship, tracking graduate outcomes, contributing to local development – developing regional partnerships, supporting entrepreneurship, tracking graduate outcomes, contributing to local development. But these efforts remain fragmented, uneven, and often invisible beyond their immediate networks.
If they now take the lead in standardizing how impact is defined, measured, and reported, they can help the entire sector move forward. And if they choose to step forward once again, they can elevate not only their own role, but the purpose of higher education itself.
Gisela Veritier is president of CLADEA, Latin American Council of Management Schools, an association that brings together educational institutions from the Americas, Europe, and Oceania. Benjamin Stevenin is special adviser to Poets&Quants and former Director of Business School Solutions and Partnerships at Times Higher Education. Guillermo Cisneros is the founder of Unnivers World Class Education, a global think tank with the mission of generating knowledge, fostering collaboration, developing diagnostic tools, and providing the expertise necessary to drive and support change in higher education.
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