AMBA International Accreditation
The portfolio of Master of Business Administration programmes offered by the Faculty of Economic Sciences and Management at Nicolaus Copernicus University has been awarded prestigious accreditation by The Association of MBAs (AMBA), one of the leading authorities in the field of business education.
Our programme was first accredited in 2018. The certificate confirming the accreditation was received by Prof. Robert Karaszewski, PhD, Director of the Programme, during the AMBA Global Conference, which took place on 13-15 May 2019 in Istanbul.
In June 2021, and then in June 2024, the MBA Programme was re-accredited.
AMBA accreditation confirms the highest standard in business education and is awarded only to the best management programmes. It is held by Master of Business Administration (MBA), Master of Business Management (MBM) and Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) programmes at only 2% of the world’s best business schools, including London Business School, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Maastricht University and the University of Ljubljana.
In Poland, only seven universities have been awarded AMBA accreditation so far (apart from NCU, they also include Kozminski University, Gdańsk University of Technology, Warsaw School of Economics, Poznań University of Economics, Wrocław University of Economics and Warsaw University). The Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń is the first public university in Poland to offer EMBA programmes accredited by both AACSB and AMBA.
AMBA’s strict evaluation criteria ensure that only programmes that demonstrate the highest standards in education, curricula and student interaction achieve accreditation. The distinction is international in scope, and the organisation works with academics at leading educational institutions around the world to continuously update its accreditation criteria and maintain a unique, in-depth and detailed approach.
It should be noted that AMBA membership is necessary for a university to apply for accreditation, but it does not guarantee that it will be granted. A full list of institutions accredited by the Association of AMBAs is available on the website https://www.associationofmbas.com/business-schools/accreditation/accredited-schools/.
Once FESM has been accredited, EMBA NCU participants and graduates can join the global community of AMBA members, comprising over 70,000 students and graduates in 80 countries, to network and develop their careers.
Accreditation distinguishes the best programmes internationally and confirms the highest standards in business education. Accreditation sets very high requirements for the programme and participants and has an impact on several key elements:
how the programme is developed and whether it is consulted with experts from the field;
how lecturers are selected – in our case, approximately 50% of lecturers are practitioners, while the other half are university staff with practical experience who are experts in their field. It is this combination of theory and practice that produces the best synergy;
how we select participants – accreditation ‘forces’ the creation of diverse groups, enabling participants to draw on each other’s professional experiences;
how many hours does such a programme have and how long does it last – accredited programmes usually last 1.5-2 years, as they must include a minimum of 500 hours of classes, during which there is interaction between the lecturer and the group (including the transfer of knowledge by the lecturer and the opportunity for participants to ask questions), as well as the exchange of experiences between participants in the group, supervised by the lecturer. It is therefore a matter of conducting contact classes, rather than recorded lectures.
FESM obtained funding from the ‘Foreign Accreditations’ project, implemented by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, for both the accreditation and re-accreditation processes. The ‘Foreign Accreditations’ project was implemented by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education as part of Measure 3.3 Internationalisation of Polish Higher Education of the Operational Programme Knowledge Education Development. Its aim is to enable Polish universities to obtain foreign accreditations and certificates from industry committees, thereby increasing the international competitiveness of universities.
AMBA certificate of accreditation 2018 (173 KB)