by Carlotta Mast

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Business students and MBA admissions professionals from Cornell, Duke, Yale, New York University, and the University of California, Berkeley, visited nine cities throughout the United States this fall to accomplish an objective that also ranks high on the priority list of many MBA administrators: to get more women and underrepresented minorities into corporate America’s executive suites by first providing them with a top-notch business education.

The five schools joined forces three years ago to form the Diversity Alliance [see footnote]. The group hosts receptions and panel discussions in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Detroit, and a handful of other cities each fall to reach out to those women and underrepresented minorities who have taken the GMAT and to educate them on the MBA admissions processes at their schools and on the benefits of obtaining an MBA degree.

“Each one of us draws some audience, but collectively we draw a much larger audience and can provide a nice diversity of program choices for the people who come to the panel discussions,” says Angela Noble-Grange, director of the office for women and minorities at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management.

“The goal is to get them to apply and to empower them and help them realize they can do this,” says Jett Pihakis, director of domestic admissions at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Diversity Alliance member. “Oftentimes there is a lot of anxiety when people feel they are not appropriate candidates for an MBA.”

While the Diversity Alliance members would love to have the prospects they reach join their schools, the ultimate aim is to get them into one of the “top MBA programs,” where the dearth of women and people of color is particularly noticeable, Noble-Grange says. Those schools, she adds, “have a responsibility to be sure we are providing opportunities for women and minorities.”

The Diversity Alliance’s work—and the individual efforts of other business schools across the United States to enroll more women and minorities—comes at time when, according to Business Week online, women make up on average just 28 percent of first-year full-time MBA students within Business Week’s top 30 U.S. MBA programs. (On average, women make up 35 percent of first-year full-time MBA students at 251 business schools worldwide, Business Week online reports.)

The percentage of underrepresented minorities—namely, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans—enrolled full time at Business Week’s top 30 U.S. MBA programs ranges from 4 to 20

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Footnote: The Diversity Alliance should not be confused with the Diversity Pipeline Alliance (www.diversitypipeline.org), a coalition of nonprofit organizations led by the Graduate Management Admission Council and dedicated to attracting underrepresented minorities to business education and business careers.