Grading B-Schools On Their Diversity Efforts

nicole-lindsay-team

Nicole Lindsay is founder of DiversityMBAPrep

Late last year, Nicole Lindsay was working as a consultant for an organization that wanted to strengthen its website’s diversity content. To prep for a brainstorm, she surfed through more than 175 websites, including those of 140 U.S.-based graduate business schools.

What Lindsay found surprised her. More than 80 of 140 (nearly 60%) of the business school websites failed to devote a single page devoted to diversity, nothing to encourage interest or applications from under-represented minorities or women.

She recalls that her first thought was ‘These schools don’t want diversity.’ “Maybe they would prefer to have more women and minorities given a choice, but they could exist without it,” says Lindsay, a Darden MBA who had once been in charge of diversity admissions and student affairs for the Yale School of Management. “Setting the quality of such a page aside, I felt that even a poor diversity page would acknowledge, at some level, that the school had a desire to engage women and under-represented minorities as students.”

GRADING THE SCHOOLS ON FOUR CATEGORIES

The result of that experience, following years of work in the diversity space, is a new report card that grades the top 56 U.S. business schools on diversity. Lindsay says she spent about eight weeks compiling the results of her study, called “The MBAdvantage Report,” and another four weeks writing the final report. The benchmarking study compares schools’ efforts, assigns letter grades to the schools, and makes recommendations on how they can improve.

Each school received an overall grade based on separate A to F grades in four key areas: web and social media, activities and outreach, school leadership, and diversity recruitment results. Though the grading was systematic, it also was by its very nature subjective–based on Lindsay’s assessment. She currently runs Stamford, Ct.-based DiversityMBAPrep, an initiative to increase gender and ethnic diversity at top MBA programs.

No doubt, Lindsay’s school report cards are likely to be highly controversial. Harvard Business School receives a grade of C from Lindsay, even though the school’s MBA program is headed by the first woman in its history. In fact, for diversity of school leadership, Harvard is given a lowly grade of D. Rivals Stanford Graduate School of Business and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School fare much better. Both schools earned B+ grades, but also received D grades on school leadership as well.

The only school to earn a grade of A+ in the study was Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, garnering straight As in all four categories. Lindsay noted that Johnson’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion pages captured a strong sense of community, with “great pictures, content, and resources.” She found “excellent detail on ways for diverse candidates to connect with the school” along with “strong female representation among the Dean’s senior staff. One of the eleven schools with 20% or more women on its Advisory Council.” And when it came to actual results, she said Johnson displayed “excellent transparency with strong diversity recruitment results.”

A DOZEN OF 56 TOP U.S. SCHOOLS GOT A GRADES

All told, a dozen schools were awarded grades of A. They include Babson College, Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School, Chicago Booth, Duke University’s Fuqua School, Emory University’s Goizueta School, and UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business (see table for complete list on following page).

The only school to receive two F grades, in web and social media and school leadership was Boston College. Lindsay noted that BC’s Carroll School got the flunking grades largely for not making any diversity activities or outreach apparent on its website and for having a mission statement that failed to incorporate diversity.

Of the top 56 business schools, only half a dozen got either a grade of D or D+ for their overall diversity efforts: Boston College, Georgia Tech, Northeastern, Thunderbird School of Global Management, UC-Irvine’s Merage School, and the Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina.

SOME IRONY IN THE D-GRADED RESULTS

In some cases, it’s ironic that some of these schools were singled out by Lindsay. The Moore School, for example, is one of the few business schools in the world endowed by a woman, Darla Moore. Georgia Institute of Technology’s Scheller College of Business is the only prominent business school whose dean, Steve Salbu. is openly gay. The percentage of female students at Wharton (42%), Harvard (40%) and Stanford (35%) exceed those at A+ Cornell (32%). Interestingly, the big three also appear to have a greater representation of minorities than Cornell. Wharton reports its “minority enrollment” at 28%, Harvard at 24% and Stanford at 20% versus a 14% number for “under-represented minorities” at Cornell.

Questions about this article? Email us or leave a comment below.