I don't know if VIU would pay consultants - maybe - but I do know that they used to be "Malaspina College" until the BC Liberals tried to secure their re-election by renaming some community colleges universities. In Canada, "university" is a higher level of post-secondary education - it's the top. It can offer masters' and PhD degrees. Universities do original research, have research labs, publishing faculty, etc. Colleges typically cannot offer higher degrees and do not have a lot of faculty that do original research, but they are getting more and more BAs that they can offer. Community colleges are the lowest of the post-secondary sector in Canada, and rarely offer degrees.
So VIU used to be a college and only became a university very recently. Its MBA program is new and not as well-established as other schools. While it's thousands of times better than an MBA offered by a private "college", it may not be as well-recognized in other parts of the world.
