Top American business school. 10% minority enrollment. That’s “diversity”?
The Yale School of Management is considered one of the best business schools in the world. Yale recently announced that 290 new students had arrived on campus to begin their first-year MBA studies – the Class of 2015. Here’s what they said:
The numbers confirm that the full-time Class of 2015 is a diverse and accomplished group. The class is 39% women, 32% international students, and 10% U.S. underrepresented minorities.
10%?
On a bschool applicant discussion forum, several current Yale students were quick to the defense, asserting that compared to its peer schools, Yale was doing fine on minority enrollment and citing the fact that Duke reports 9% enrollment of minorities in its MBA class, and NYU is at 12%.
We should be equally up in arms about those numbers. We’re mostly reacting to the Yale figure because Yale has a smaller class size than either of those schools held up as peers – we can only use Class of 2014 numbers here because not all schools have released data for this fall’s matriculating cohort:
Yale: 290 total students, 10% minority = 29 minority students
NYU: 389 total students, 12% minority = 46 minority students
Duke: 432 total students, 9% minority = 38 minority students
Of the 1,111 students at these three American graduate schools of business, only 113 are Hispanic/Latino or African-American/black.
The business schools use the phrase “underrepresented minority” because there’s actually an overflow of applications from those of Asian heritage, both international applicants and American citizens. In fact, NYU with the 12% underrepresented minority enrollment simultaneously reports that 29% of their class are minorities – which we can only deduce means that 17% of their 389 students are Asian-Americans.
We get it. The reason that these schools are reporting such appalling numbers is that there aren’t huge volumes of applications coming in from these populations. You can’t admit a Latina to get an MBA from your school if she never applied.
There are a variety of organizations that exist with the sole purpose of widening the funnel and creating more feeders for minority candidates into the ranks of the top business schools and beyond, into leadership positions in the business world. The Consortium, Management Leadership for Tomorrow, and the Riordan Scholars at UCLA are three such programs. Yale and its peers are all participating in these efforts. Yale has the requisite Diversity page on its website and there’s a Black Business Alliance listed among all the other student clubs. It appears to be doing what it’s supposed to be doing. It’s participating.
But look around on the Yale SOM website, newly redesigned and freshly launched just a week ago, and it’s very difficult to find any photos with underrepresented minorities. Sure, there’s diversity in evidence, based on the fact that a third of the student body is international. That image at the top of this article was used to announce that “diverse” class we have been discussing – it’s on the front page of the Yale website today, 17 August.
It’s impossible to identify individuals’ racial makeup from a crowded photo but search as we might, we just didn’t spot anyone who appears to be Hispanic or black in that photo. Lots of smiling faces. Lots of Asians and white people. A good number of women. Hispanic or Latino/a or African-American?
We’re not fond of the too-obvious strategy some schools use, of posting photos of people of color prominently – those look like this:
But there simply aren’t any such images on the Yale MBA site. And when we look at the list of Yale SOM faculty — they list them with photos — we’re just not seeing much diversity in the underrepresented minority kind. There’s Dr. Heather Tookes… is that it?? Definitely none of the Yale leadership team is in this category.
EssaySnark is not an MBA candidate – been there, done that, not planning on going back to school anytime soon. However if we were someone who was considering applying to a school, and doing our research, and poking around on these websites — and we happened to be in one of these underrepresented populations — it’s hard to see how we would be attracted to a school like Yale.
Yale University publishes demographic data covering students and faculty at all schools. For Fall 2012, university-wide, among all schools and colleges including the School of Management, Yale reported that 15% of their American students were Hispanic or black. That’s not 15% of the entire student population; it’s 15% of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. To its credit, Yale University scores a 0.61 rating on the U.S. News Campus Ethnic Diversity scale, which is within the top 50 of all national universities. Hopefully the 10% underrepresented minority figure that Yale SOM is reporting is across its entire class, and not just the ratio of American students who are minorities; if it’s actually only 10% of the 198 U.S. students on campus, then we’re going to be even more appalled.
The consensus in that discussion thread among MBA applicants and current Yale students is that it’s systemic; however, the schools need to do better. Defending a school’s 10% enrollment of underrepresented minorities because it’s comparable to what its peers are doing just doesn’t cut it. Isn’t that how all bad behaviors of past eras have been justified?
