Duke Fuqua Becomes 24th Member Of The Consortium

The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Alex Boerner photo

At a time when admission officials are struggling to enroll diverse classes of MBA students, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business has joined the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management. Fuqua will become the 24th university to join the organization which is devoted to increasing the number of underrepresented minorities in business education.

Fuqua’s membership, approved by the Consortium’s Board of Trustees on April 4, comes in the aftermath of a controversial ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court which made affirmative action in university admissions unlawful. That decision, along with increasing pressure from right-wing state legislators, has made it increasingly difficult for MBA admission officials to recruit, admit, and enroll diverse cohorts into their programs.

In many cases, admission staffers can no longer see whether an applicant is a male or female, or whether a candidate is an underrepresented minority. No less crucial, the general council’s office at many universities has told admissions staff that they cannot consider gender or race in their admission decisions or would expose the school to legal liability.

CLASS OF 2025 DAYTIME MBA COHORT: 27% UNDERREPRESENTED MINORITIES

While the Supreme Court decision has made it more difficult to enroll more diverse classes, Fuqua’s decision to join the Consortium predates the court’s ruling. “We’ve been having conversations internally for many years, and membership was a goal of mine when I joined Fuqua given my affiliation with them during my time at Georgetown,” says Fuqua Associate Dean of Admissions Shari Hubert, who left Georgetown to move to Fuqua in 2017.  “So we were very excited when the opportunity arose this year to be invited.”

In its latest full-time MBA cohort for the Class of 2025, 45% of the 385 incoming students identified as female while 27% were U.S. underrepresented minorities.  Some 14% of the class identify as black or African-American. That class, however, was recruited and enrolled before the Supreme Court’s decision in June of 2023. Even before the decision, minorities at the leading U.S. MBA programs declined at two-thirds of the Top 30 MBA programs in the U.S.

In a statement, Consortium CEO and Executive Director Peter Aranda praised Fuqua’s entrance into the organization. “For many years,” he said, “Fuqua and The Consortium have shared a deep commitment in diversity, equity and inclusion. Today, we are thrilled to announce that our institutions will partner to enhance our collective efforts and results on this front. We look forward to working in collaboration with DEanBill Boulding and his team as we continue to advance and accelerate the critical missions of Fuqua and The Consortium.”

Fuqua, whose membership becomes effective on July 1, will begin recruiting its first Consortium class in August of 2024. Fuqua is the first business school to become a Consortium member since the group approved the membership of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2022. Kellogg became the group’s 23th member, while Stanford was number 22.

These latest three schools join the following members: Columbia Business School, UC-Berkeley Haas School of Business, Yale School of Management, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, UCLA Anderson School of Management, Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business, the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business, the University of Washington Foster School of Business, Emory University Goizueta Business School, Georgetown University McDonough School of Business, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler Business School, and Rice University Jones Graduate School of Business — as well as the original three member schools, Washington University in St. Louis Olin Business School, Indiana University Kelley School of Business, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Business School.

DON’T MISS: MINORITIES AT THE LEADING U.S. MBA PROGRAMS: 2/3 OF THE TOP 30 REPORT DECLINES