(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- A year ago, one of the questions swirling around selective business schools—and selective schools of all types—was whether the Supreme Court’s decision barring them from considering race in admissions would doom their efforts to make classes more diverse. Now, with the class of 2026 settled into its first term, we have an answer: Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans and Pacific Islanders increased their numbers across most of the full-time MBA programs at the top 18 schools in Bloomberg Businessweek’s ranking, after two years of decline. But the growth wasuneven among both the schools and the ethnic groups.
Fifteen of the 18 highest-ranked schools disclose detailed and transparent breakdowns of their full-time MBA classes by race and ethnicity. (Carnegie Mellon, Cornell and Georgia Tech are the exceptions, although they have provided this information to Bloomberg in the past for the annual ranking.) Of these schools, six saw big upticks in the number of new underrepresented minority (URM) students. And four modestly increased enrollment in underrepresented minorities, though the share they represented of US students mostly held steady or fell slightly. But five of the most prestigious institutions reported fewer underrepresented minorities in their MBA programs, both as a total and as a share of US students.
The sharpest increases came at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, which had both experienced several years of declining Black and Hispanic enrollment. The number of new underrepresented minority students almost tripled at Haas, to 42, and more than doubled at Ross, to 59, and their share of the total class more than doubled at both schools, to about 15%. Duke, New York University, the University of Virginia and Dartmouth also posted big gains. At Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, these minorities represented 22% of the class, the highest of any of the 15 schools we assessed. Hispanic enrollment more than doubled at Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and nearly doubled at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business though Black enrollment, already low, fell further at both schools.
Indeed, across all 15 institutions, most of the enrollment increases occurred among Hispanics. Black enrollment barely budged. Native American and Pacific Islander students more than doubled their presence—from six students to 14 overall. (Half of them enrolled at just two schools.)
On the other hand, top-ranked Stanford University enrolled 45% fewer Hispanic students. At Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, the number of enrolled Black students plummeted from 20 to 5, and Hispanics dropped by almost half. Enrollment also fell sharply at MIT Sloan School of Management, and less dramatically at Harvard Business School and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Comparing students’ race and ethnicity across schools is complicated because schools use two different counting methods. The reporting for this story relies on student counts using the method required by the federal government, in which students who identify their background are counted once, either in a specific category or as generally multiracial.
The results replicate the experience of Management Leadership for Tomorrow, which prepares disadvantaged—predominantly Black and Hispanic—candidates to apply to top-ranked US business schools, according to founder and Chief Executive Officer John Rice. Each year, MLT grooms more than 300 fellows, as they’re called, who lack the networks and other resources possessed by more affluent applicants over nine months before applying and then through school. “These are folks who have longer-term leadership potential, but have some scrappiness, and are coachable,” Rice says. And while overall, MLT’s success rate didn’t change in this last cycle—95% of its fellows were accepted into at least one of the organization’s 25 partner schools—fewer Blacks and Hispanics got into the five schools that posted declines in underrepresented minorities, which MLT calls the country’s most selective.
“Some of the strongest candidates really struggled,” says Kevin Donahue, MLT’s chief strategy officer. In the previous five years, MLT’s minority fellows who scored at least 700 (out of 800) on the GMAT entrance exam had an 87% chance of getting into one of the five schools, he says. That fell to 76% for the class that just matriculated.
Rice argues that fellows’ experience this past year reveals a benign truth about how racial preferences have been deployed—they don’t, as opponents argue, favor unqualified applicants at the expense of qualified candidates. Rather, they allow admissions officers to “sculpt a class” from an overabundance of highly qualified candidates. Business schools genuinely want a class that’s broadly diverse, he says—in careers and industries but also in education, life experience and culture, even geographic background. And while race and ethnicity are an undeniable marker for many of these attributes, race, Rice says, “is also its own independent variable that shapes your experience and the perspectives you bring to the group work and cases and learning from one another.”
The proof, Rice says, is that while these five schools are significantly less diverse, their average GMAT scores haven’t gone up. In fact, Wharton and Kellogg both recorded tiny increases in average GMAT score, while Michigan’s much more diverse class notched a 9-point jump.
Greg Hanifee, Kellogg’s associate dean for degree operations, describes the two-point GMAT increase at his school as “not statistically significant.” And he says Kellogg didn’t reject more Black and Hispanic candidates this year. Seating a class is more than just granting admission—it’s a multi-step process that begins with building awareness and recruiting. Like most US schools, Northwestern saw big increases in applications from both within the US and abroad, according to Hanifee, including from Blacks and Hispanics. That’s partly, he says, because the school joined the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, a group of top-ranked business schools that makes it easier and cheaper for minority students to apply to many schools at once. The school in retrospect admitted these students, Hanifee says, at the same rate as before.
But far fewer accepted the offer. Converting admitted candidates into enrolled students—the last step, known as yield—has been a long-standing obstacle to increasing diversity at top business schools. Some observers thought that extended slumps at Berkeley and Michigan, which had long operated under bans on racial preferences and were among the first to develop programs promoting diversity and equity as workarounds, would only get worse as more of their peers established their own programs. Besides competing with their peers, business schools also compete with other job opportunities that may come a candidate’s way—and increasingly with the security of a current job.
“Yield was definitely harder this time,” Hanifee says. “Our efforts to win people that we admitted fell short, and we would love to be able to learn from this—which we are—and think about what we’re going to do differently moving forward.”
The other schools with fewer URM students—Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Wharton—all declined to comment on their fall 2024 incoming classes. Donahue says MLT doesn’t have enough fellows to speak specifically about a single school in one year.
At Berkeley, where the yield rate for underrepresented minorities had been half the class average, Blacks and Hispanics comprised a slightly bigger share of the applicant pool this year, according to Eric Askins, director of full-time MBA admissions. The school’s offer rates held steady. “Our overall yield went through the roof,” Askins said by email, citing “real and authentic connections with applicants” on the part of the admissions office and current students. Haas is also in the middle of a five-year campaign to raise $20 million for diversity scholarships.
Askins declined to say more about Haas’ minority enrollment efforts. But Berkeley, Duke and NYU all took two significant steps: They increased both the size of their classes—by 20% at Haas—and the share of US enrollment, even though most of the application growth this year at Berkeley, and across US business schools, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council, came from abroad. Few other schools did both.
Neither Berkeley nor NYU would comment on a potential correlation. A spokesperson for Duke said by email that a trend here “does not reflect our experience and connecting those figures would not show the full picture,” but declined to elaborate. For his part, MLT’s Donahue suspects that some of the uptick at Haas and other schools includes students who previously would’ve been accepted at the very top-tier programs.
However, the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, which Bloomberg ranks 24th among US full-time MBA programs, undertook a similar strategy and returned similar results, increasing the number of underrepresented minorities by two-thirds and their share to 17% of the class. Brent Nagamine, the school’s head of MBA admissions, said by email that a year ago, the school set a target of 115 to 120 students “with a domestic representation of about 55 percent,” up from 44%. To keep expenses down, Foster attended a lot of Consortium recruiting fairs, which are free to member schools like Foster. (Still, Nagamine concedes, Foster is a small school, and “this might really just be a matter of a small number of people moving the needle dramatically.”)
At Kellogg, Hanifee declined to say whether the school will consider adjusting its class in this way. He said that Kellogg has already changed how it recruits and then hopefully enrolls admitted minority candidates. But, he added, “I think that’s an interview for next year.”
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