Business schools in the Bay Area and across the country are stepping up efforts to prepare their students for an increasingly global, multicultural workforce.
It comes against the backdrop of social and racial upheavals in recent years that have driven home to both schools and companies the need to improve employee diversity and a sense of belonging for all. That’s changing the students that business schools are seeking to accept and what they are taught.
“Students and graduates have to learn to work and thrive in an increasingly diverse workplace,” said Eugene Sivadas, dean of the Lam Family College of Business at San Francisco State University. “Business schools train the leaders of tomorrow and have an ethical obligation to contribute to a more inclusive workplace.”
San Francisco State, UC Berkeley and Stanford University are among the higher-education institutions leading the charge in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) — policies and programs designed to encourage representation and participation of people across racial, ethnic, gender and other backgrounds.
These schools or their academic business departments have been incorporating DEI in admissions, the curriculum and other areas to draw in and support a more diverse student body than before. Another goal is to help graduates apply in their professional life the DEI principles they’ve learned at school.
Some institutions such as UC Berkeley and Stanford have devised comprehensive plans detailing their DEI strategies and goals and hired diversity chiefs for theirbusiness schools.
While diversity leaders see DEI as a moral imperative, some studies show it can benefit a company’s bottom line. According to a Boston Consulting Group study in 2018, companies that employed a highly diverse management team generated 19% greater revenue related to innovation than those that had below-average diversity — 45% versus just 26%.
“Understanding diversity, equity and inclusion and bringing that lens to specific roles and industries will directly enhance our graduates’ ability to serve the needs of globally and locally diverse populations,” said Élida Bautista, chief DEI officer at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. “Business schools have a responsibility to increase access to the opportunities to lead in these spaces, so that collectively we have more diverse voices at the table innovating and informing how we conduct business.”
Adjusting admissions
In seeking to improve upon diversity in its student body, Haas has retooled its acceptance process.
“We were honest and open about our shortfall in yielding a racially diverse student body and detailed what we were actively doing to make Haas the top choice for students committed to increasing diversity, equity and inclusion,” Bautista said.
Haas adjusted its MBA admissions interview to include a question about contributions to diversity and related issues “in order to convey this as a priority for our school,” Bautista said. “We also added an optional admissions essay, giving applicants the opportunity to share their ‘distance traveled’ — any adversities they had overcome that would give us insight into opportunity gaps in their profiles.”
Another key shift that Haas has taken involved its scholarship approach. “Between 2018 and 2019, we doubled scholarship funding and reduced barriers to applying for scholarships,” Bautista said, “and we continue to do so.”
Haas has also reevaluated the structure of its community outreach. “This includes opening up new avenues of partnership with organizations that serve a variety of populations,” said Eric Askins, executive director of full-time admissions at Haas.
A steady increase in the numbers of minority and underrepresented students indicates Haas’ strategies are working. For instance, minorities represent 49% of the 2023 class compared to the 30% for 2019 — not including international students, according to Haas.
“We have been successful over the past few years in enrolling more students from diverse backgrounds, especially underrepresented minorities, veterans and LGBTQ+ students,” Askins said.
At Stanford, the Graduate School of Business (GSB) has launched the Building Opportunities for Leadership Diversity fellowship program, which augments financial aid for MBA students with economic or other hardships who show commitment to diversity issues.
GSB has also developed the Sí Se Puede fee waiver program to encourage prospective students from Latin America to pursue an MBA at Stanford. In addition, GSB has retooled its Research Fellows Program by focusing on building a diverse pipeline for the doctorate program.
“These are all part of a larger initiative across the university to create an inclusive, accessible, diverse and equitable learning environment for all community members,” said Sarah Soule, senior associate dean who oversees DEI at GSB.
Integrating DEI into the curriculum
Schools are also weaving DEI into their curriculum and other academic activities.
At Stanford, first-year MBA students now participate in the DEI Arc of Learning. “They gain new skills to identify implicit bias and understand best practices for fostering a culture of belonging, which they can use at GSB and then bring with them into their post-GSB leadership roles,” Soule said. The program gives them “an opportunity to get to know one another better. This helps us create a culture of learning and understanding together.”
At San Francisco State, strong demand for one particular course, called Managing Diversity in the Workplace, “indicates that our students are interested in learning more about how to be champions for DEI within organizations,” said Robert Bonner, assistant professor of management.
Among the DEI-infused offerings at Haas are Dialogues on Race, Business Communication in Diverse Work Environments and the Equity Fluent Leadership courses.
In addition, degree programs at Haas have some DEI curriculum in the orientation of their respective students. The curriculum includes understanding and addressing microaggressions, applied practice sessions for combating bias and allyship training.
“We are creating a sense of belonging at Haas through a variety of offerings, including courses and co-curricular educational and professional development activities, as well as community social events,” Bautista said.
Elsewhere, Menlo College — which specializes in business — has started the minor in equity and justice studies. The degree program is “a pathway for students to hone their critical transnational consciousness and to embolden their commitment to a more equitable, humane and just world,” Marianne Marar Yacobian, professor of global studies, said on the college website.
Bringing DEI into the workplace
Business graduates are spreading DEI concepts and values across different work environments.
Haas alumnus Om Chitale, who co-founded the student-led class Dialogues on Race, serves as LinkedIn’s senior program manager of Inclusion Recruiting Partnerships.
In that role, Chitale said, he begins any recruiting and partnership work “with the fundamental understanding of inequitable practices in our business community’s approach, which allows me to take a gap-closing approach to what I produce and the impact I have.”
Stanford GSB graduate Kayiita Johnson founded PM While Black, which supports African Americans who aspire to a career in product management.
Johnson wants to fill an accessibility gap in that field. “There are very few collegiate programs that lead to product management roles,” he said, “and it tends to be something you learn about through your network or through tech companies. Of course, this leads to underrepresentation of minorities.”
Johnson believes DEI is integral to business success. For one, “it helps companies make better decisions,” he said. An array of perspectives “allows for robust debate and full exploration of options for each decision a company makes, which will allow for better products and better business outcomes.”
DEI also helps a company’s employee retention. “Knowing that your differences are valued, that the company has a focus on justice and that you belong have a huge impact on employees,” Johnson said.
Dedicated posts still lacking
Despite the surge in DEI efforts in higher education in general, there remains a lack of diversity top roles at business schools, especially compared to what’s happeningin the corporate world.
In a recent article, the higher-education news outlet Insight Into Diversity reported that a cursory examination of more than 500 business schools in the country found that few have leadership posts specific to diversity and related matters.
In contrast, the corporate sphere has seen an increase in DEI-dedicated positions, primarily as a response to nationwide anti-racism and social-justice movements, the article said.
But Stephanie Bryant, global chief accreditation officer of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), pointed out that many higher-education institutions centralize DEI resources to make them available across academic departments.
“The need for diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging doesn’t stop with the business school,” Bryant said. “It is needed everywhere in the university.”
Still, AACSB is committed to bolstering DEI at business schools. Six of nine standards in the association’s accreditation process include the concept of diversity, Bryant said. The organization is also part of The PhD Project, established in 1994 to encourage underrepresented minorities to consider becoming a faculty member in a business school.
The project has seen the number of minorities earning a business doctorate in the U.S. quintuple from 294 in 1994 to more than 1,500 today, according to Bryant.
“Across business schools, there is a need to collectively invest in increasing representation from historically excluded groups by creating opportunities and pipelines for Ph.D. students and faculty hires,” Bautista said. “This will have a direct impact on the body of knowledge that is researched, the curriculum we develop and the classroom experience of our undergraduate and graduate students, thereby increasing the diversity of students who choose to pursue business.”
Neil Gonzales is a Redwood City-based freelance writer.