Keywords and distinctiveness in association to advance collegiate schools of business-accredited US business school mission statement: a text-analytics study

Purpose The purpose of this study is to answer the following questions. First, are there common keywords that the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB)-accredited business schools in the USA use in their mission statements? Second, are the mission statements truly distinctive among AACSB-accredited business schools in the USA? Design/methodology/approach This study uses text-analytics application programming interfaces to identify the common elements in the mission statements of 548 AACSB-accredited business schools in the USA. In addition, this study conducted a series of F-tests to examine whether the mission statements are distinctive across AACSB-accredited business schools in the USA. Findings Results illustrate that certain keywords are commonly used in the mission statement depending on the geographic region, institutional size and ranking of the business schools. In addition, when considering geographic region and ranking, the mission statements of AACSB-accredited business schools were not truly distinctive from one another based on keyword distributions. Originality/value This study complements research streams focusing on exploring the impact of the mission statement of AACSB-accredited business schools in the USA. This study also provides higher education administrators with recommendations that may help business schools better serve their stakeholders.