Business Schools Still Lag on Diversity, Despite Stated Goals

In the months after Minneapolis police officers killed George Floyd in May 2020, prompting millions of protesters to march in US cities for racial justice, the nation’s best-regarded business schools quickly responded. Most of them publicly committed to racial equity and inclusion, and many began formulating changes meant to bring more underrepresented minorities to campus.

Three years later, most of those schools enrolled a lower, or at best the same, share of underrepresented minority students in their full-time MBA programs, according to data from 22 of the top 26 schools (the Top 25, plus a tie) in Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2023 ranking. Only six reported slightly higher shares of these students matriculating in 2023 than in 2020, and a somewhat different group of just six schools enrolled greater numbers of these students.