How The End Of Affirmative Action Will Affect MBA Admissions

Reactions to the recent Supreme Court decision regarding affirmative action as practiced by Harvard College and the University of North Carolina have tended to focus on its affect on admission to college. The effect on admissions practices at MBA programs is, however, a different story.

MBA admissions committees have long embraced the value of building a diverse class—for very practical reasons. Most MBA programs today teach using the case study method, which originated at Harvard Business School. An MBA class is highly interactive. It works best when participants bring a variety of experience, both personal and professional, to the discussion.

Diversity Of Sector

Race has captured everyone´s attention in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. However, the most important form of diversity in an MBA classroom is arguably diversity of industry.

One day in an MBA classroom at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, I heard the professor of project management ask, “Who here has been the lead on a project that fell behind schedule?” Ten hands shot up.

“What industries?” he asked. Automotive, retail, health care and others were named by students whose accents suggested they came from several different countries: India, Brazil, the United States. It was clear that the range of experience in the student body was critical to the ensuing discussion of what can be done to keep a project on track.

Such a range of experience is represented by the individuals an admissions committee chooses in composing a class. MBA admissions are not captured by a model of abstract excellence on an absolute scale. In this, it is unlike admissions in, for example, India or China, where students take a national entrance exam and are ranked in descending numerical order; though even in those cases, some adjustments are made for ethnicity. Rather, decisions to admit students to a U.S. MBA program must reflect the needs of the class.

This makes diversity in the largest sense a fundamental factor in MBA admissions.

Diversity In Leadership

Success in business today requires the skills to do business with people whose culture, background and concerns vary. The best way to provide future leaders with that outlook and those skills is to build diversity into the MBA experience.

Dean Kerwin K. Charles makes it clear that the Yale School of Management is training leaders not only for business, but also for society. His statement on inclusion and diversity on the Yale SOM website does not specify race. “We seek to achieve inclusion and diversity in our community as an inseparable aspect of our mission of educating leaders for business and society—leaders who, working in all sectors and across all geographies, can improve the lives of those around them. We will be unrelenting in our efforts to weave this perspective into all our programs.”

Such efforts begin with admissions. These efforts need not end as a consequence of the June 29 Supreme Court decision, if our understanding of diversity is larger than that of diversity of race. However, discussion has just begun on that point. In the meantime, how will the Supreme Court”s decision affect the procedures by which MBA admissions committees make their decisions?

The Case Of California

Anthony Whitten is director of diversity admissions at University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business. Whitten told me, “As I understand it, the Supreme Court decision doesn’t impact our status quo at Haas. Proposition 209 has forbade the use of race in admissions at public California institutions for the last 27 years.”

I asked Whitten to comment on the use of video essays and interviews that are required of applicants to Haas and other business schools. Some people are wondering whether video essays should be banned, because visual evidence of a candidate’s race might influence the evaluation.

Whitten replied, “I would argue two things: 1) trainings for evaluators around understanding and recognizing bias are important and necessary. 2) What someone says in an interview is always far more important than what they look like or what they wear.”

Addressing the video interview, Whitten said, “We added the video interview as a means of getting to know candidates more. Since the onset of COVID-19, we have been offering a pre-recorded interview option. I see this video essay as merely an extension of something we have been doing for nearly three cycles of admissions.”

The MBA Experience Is Unlike College

Diversity in the MBA space is a concept larger than race, and critical to the case study method in ways that may well differ from the claims about college education rejected by the majority Opinion of the Court (page 23). In light of the Supreme Court decision, MBA admissions committees may need to think carefully about their means, but there is no question that they will hold fast to the end.