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The Art of Admissions
Diversity: B-Schools Join Forces
by Carlotta Mast
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.
Many business schools are working actively to attract more women and people of color, through outreach programs and scholarships. MBA admissions professionals are also aggressively recruiting students from outside the United States to make their classrooms more diverse.
At Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management, for example, a full-time staff member is assigned to organizing scholarships, mentoring programs, and campus visits for the school’s minority students and prospects. Krannert also offers scholarship opportunities and hosts outreach events for women and international students.
This fall, Cornell’s Johnson School launched a program called Johnson Means Business, through which the school brought in 23 people of color from around the country who showed potential for succeeding in the Johnson MBA program. The prospects had three days to socialize with students, meet faculty members, and bond with the school and one another. Since that weekend, 12 of the students have applied to Johnson, and the school’s admissions office remains in contact with all of the participants via the Internet to answer questions and offer guidance.
Supported by an army of corporations, including Dell, Deloitte Consulting, and Goldman Sachs, the University of Michigan Business School recently created a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing funds and support for women to go to business school. The group plans to offer hundreds of scholarships, host recruiting events throughout the United States, and coordinate summer internship opportunities for female MBA students.
The hope is that these efforts will begin to bring more diversity into the MBA community and, ultimately, the corporate world, where the picture these days is still mostly male and monochromatic.
“There are not enough women or minorities running our Fortune 500 companies or even participating in corporate America,” Cornell’s Noble-Grange says. “The customer base and labor force that we have in this country right now is very diverse. So to be able to sell well to your customers and be good managers to your employees, you need to have diversity throughout the company, including at the very top.” //
Carlotta Mast, a freelance contributor to Selections, has also written for Business Week online and Working Woman magazine. Her article “The Art of Admissions” appears in the spring 2002 issue of Selections.
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.
© Selections: Spring 2002