Salisbury State University's Perdue School of Business has won accreditation by the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), university officials said yesterday.

The accreditation covers both the Perdue school's 1,000-student bachelor's degree in business and its 100-student Master of Business Administration programs, making Salisbury the fourth institution in Maryland to have accreditation at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. The others are University of Maryland College Park, University of Baltimore and Loyola College.

Accreditation by AACSB "is a very rigorous process that forces you to make sure you're meeting the highest standards of the profession," K. Nelson Butler, the university's vice president for academic affairs, said yesterday. Fewer than one in five of the 1,800 college-level business programs in the United States have AACSB accreditation.

"To do this, we had the help of the Perdue organization and the dedicated work of many faculty and administration members," Mr. Butler said.

The school received a $2.5 million endowment from Frank Perdue, the Eastern Shore poultry millionaire, in 1986, enabling it to expand programs and prepare to compete for accreditation.

Accreditation is important because "graduates of the accredited business] schools have an easier time getting jobs," Mr. Perdue, himself a Salisbury State alumnus, said in a news release yesterday.

The school undertook a self-study, the first step in the accreditation process, during the 1991-1992 academic year and was visited by a team of deans of three accredited schools in 1992.