Minorities At The Top U.S. MBA Programs: After 2 Years Of Declines, What Next?

A year after the United States Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, business schools in the U.S. are facing a crisis in minority MBA enrollment.

And while it is unclear what effect the SCOTUS decision had on the 2023-2024 MBA application cycle — if any — it is possible that the worst may be yet to come.

The most current available data from B-schools and U.S. News & World Report — which collects it from the schools and publishes it as part of its annual ranking, released this year in April — shows year-over-year declines in minority enrollment at a wide majority of top-ranked U.S. B-schools. Going back two application cycles, the downturn is even more definitive.

DRAMATIC DECLINES OVERALL AND IN THE ENROLLMENT OF SPECIFIC GROUPS

But the most current data is for the 2022-2023 application cycle, and thus comprises students seated in fall 2023 but selected in the winter or spring before that, when the SCOTUS ruling had been expected (and certainly braced for) but not yet been confirmed. Since the public data hasn’t fully caught up to political reality, the crisis — or at least the beginning of one, as the numbers below show — can’t be blamed on the Supreme Court, because it predates the twin decisions in Students For Fair Admissions Inc. v. University of North Carolina and Students For Fair Admissions Inc. v. President And Fellows Of Harvard College from last June.

Taking the 2022-2023 data on minority enrollment and comparing them to data from the two previous cycles shows that among the top 30 MBA programs, 19 schools had year-over-year declines in minorities averaging more than 1.5 percentage points, and 23 had declines over two cycles averaging 4.5 points. Only four schools out of 32 avoided declines between 2021 and 2023.

A few B-schools — like Florida’s Warrington College of Business, which saw a 13.4-percentage-point drop to sink to just 14% minority representation, lowest of any school analyzed by Poets&Quants — saw historically bad declines in just two years. Indiana’s Kelley School of Business dropped more than 7 points to 19.2%; Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business and Washington Olin Business School each had drops of nearly 7 points. Some B-schools saw dramatic declines in the enrollment of specific minority groups. Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management saw its Asian enrollment fall 11.5 percentage points between 2021 and 2023, to just 4.2%. Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business saw its Black students crater by more than 10 points to 2.9% in that span. And Florida Warrington lost 8.6 points in Hispanic enrollment, to just 5.3%.

All this was before SCOTUS killed affirmative action. What will the data from the 2023-2024 app cycle show? It does not immediately follow that the death of affirmative action in college admissions will have a major impact on graduate business admissions — but we won’t know for certain for another month or more, when B-schools’ MBA class profiles start trickling out.

BIGGEST DROPS IN MINORITY ENROLLMENT 2021-2023

P&Q 2024 Rank	School	Minorities 2023 – US News	Minorities 2022 – US News	Minorities 2021 – US News	3-Year Change
25	Florida (Warrington)	14.0%	17.6%	27.4%	-13.4
37	Indiana (Kelley)	19.2%	21.7%	26.4%	-7.2
24	Georgetown (McDonough)	19.9%	23.9%	26.8%	-6.9
28	Washington (Olin)	22.9%	23.2%	29.7%	-6.8
23	Emory (Goizueta)	24.1%	24.3%	30.6%	-6.5
7	Cornell (Johnson)	21.7%	21.0%	28.0%	-6.3
26	Rochester (Simon)	31.1%	31.0%	37.4%	-6.3
5	Yale SOM	26.9%	29.5%	32.6%	-5.7
16	Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)	24.2%	27.0%	29.9%	-5.7

Source: U.S. News & World Report

RACIAL BREAKDOWNS AT THE LEADING MBA PROGRAMS

Post-affirmative action, the dimensions of MBA class profile reporting have not dramatically changed. Currently, most B-schools follow federal reporting guidelines for race and ethnicity, which include five categories for race: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and White. There are also two categories for data on ethnicity: “Hispanic or Latino,” and “Not Hispanic or Latino.”

Most elite B-schools add “multi-dimensional” reporting which, as Chicago Booth School of Business describes it, “depicts students’ full racial and ethnic identities to more inclusively reflect the racial/ethnic groups they identify with beyond a grouping of ‘Multi-Race.’”

Following the federal reporting guidelines, U.S. News collects data not only on overall minority levels in MBA programs but on specific percentages of White, Asian, Hispanic, Black, and other students; in terms of minority status, the latter three account for the most seats, with Native Americans or those claiming two or more races occasionally comprising a significant portion of any given school’s class (see the table with top schools’ two-or-more-races students on page 2). With few exceptions, students of Asian descent are the most-represented in U.S. MBA programs; at most but not all schools, Hispanic students comprised the second-largest minority.

MINORITIES AT THE P&Q TOP 10, 2021-2023

P&Q 2024 Rank	School	US News 2024 Rank	Minorities 2023 – US News	Minorities 2022 – US News	Minorities 2021 – US News	3-Year Change
1	Stanford	1T	32.4%	33.1%	34.3%	-1.9
2	Harvard	6	30.9%	32.2%	32.2%	-1.3
3	Dartmouth (Tuck)	10T	NA	19.9%	NA	NA
4	Columbia	12T	NA	NA	NA	NA
5	Yale SOM	7T	26.9%	29.5%	32.6%	-5.7
6	Duke (Fuqua)	12T	23.9%	27.5%	27.6%	-3.7
7	Cornell (Johnson)	15	21.7%	21.0%	28.0%	-6.3
8	Virginia (Darden)	10T	NA	NA	NA	NA
9	Michigan (Ross)	12T	24.8%	25.5%	25.8%	-1.0
10	NYU (Stern)	7T	31.3%	27.7%	28.0%	+3.3

Source: U.S. News & World Report

MINORITY MBA ENROLLMENT IS COLLAPSING IN FLORIDA

In 2023, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania leapt to the vanguard of top U.S. B-schools with the highest percentage of minorities, at 37.6%, followed by Stanford Graduate School of Business (32.4%), USC Marshall School of Business (31.8%), MIT Sloan School of Management (31.6%), and NYU Stern School of Business (31.3%). In 2022, Chicago Booth was the top school for minority enrollment at 33.8%; like most top U.S. B-schools Booth lost ground in 2023, falling to 30.9%.

In moving to No. 1, Wharton saw the biggest year-to-year growth in minority enrollment out of 32 schools, growing 4.6 percentage points from 2022; MIT was close behind, jumping more than 4 points. Overall, however, just eight of 32 schools saw minority enrollment growth from 2022 to 2023, averaging 2.3 percentage points; over three years, only four schools are up. Nine schools are above 30% minority enrollment, three of them in the P&Q top 10; last year it was only seven schools, four in the top 10. Meanwhile seven schools are below 20%, up from four schools in 2022; the highest-ranked is No. 20 UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, at 16.8%.

The B-school with the biggest year-to-year decline in minority enrollment is Georgetown McDonough, which fell 4 points from 2022 to 2023 to 19.9%. And the school with the lowest overall percentage of minorities in its MBA program is Florida Warrington, at 14%. Florida is down 13.4 points in two years, emblematic of a statewide trend that stems from extreme anti-immigrant and anti-DEI policies passed by its conservative governor and legislature.

MINORITY ENROLLMENT AT THE TOP FLORIDA B-SCHOOLS, 2021-2023

P&Q 2024 Rank	School	US News 2024 Rank	2023 Minorities	2022 Minorities	2021 Minorities
25	Florida (Warrington)	36	14% (5.3% Hispanic, 5.3% Asian, 1.8% Black)	17.6% (9.4% Hispanic, 5.8% Black, 1.8% Asian	27.4% (13.9% Hispanic, 3.8% Black, 7.6% Asian)
73	Miami (Herbert)	62T	39.3% (25.6% Hispanic, 7.7% Black, 2.6% Asian)	37.1% (23.8% Hispanic, 4.6% Black, 4% Asian)	41.5% (30.6% Hispanic, 4.9% Asian, 3.3% Black)
84	South Florida (Muma)	87T	15.4% (9.6% Hispanic, 3.8% Asian, 1.9% Black)	21.6% (9.8% Hispanic, 5.9% Black, 5.9% Asian)	30.2% (16.3% Black, 7.0% Hispanic, 7.0% Asian)
UR	Rollins (Crummer)	UR	NA	20.3% (10.9% Hispanic, 3.6% Asian, 2.2% Black)	19.6% (9.2% Hispanic, 3.9% Black, 2.6% Asian)
UR	Florida International	110	57.1% (49.2% Hispanic, 4.8% Black, 3.2 Asian)	43.1% (31.4% Hispanic, 7.8% Black, 3.9% Asian)	54.3% (50.0% Hispanic, 4.3% Asian)
UR	Tampa (Sykes)	UR	16.7% (11.5% Hispanic, 2.6% Unknown, 0% Black)	21.3% (12.4% Hispanic, 5.6% Unknown, 3.4% Black, 3.4% Asian)	13.7% (11.6% Hispanic, 1.1% Black, 1.1% Asian)

Source: U.S. News & World Report

See the next page for breakouts of specific racial groups at the top U.S. B-schools from 2021 to 2023, and page 3 for a complete table of overall minority enrollment at more than 30 top-ranked U.S. MBA programs.