Top Business Schools See Growing Minority Enrollment

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 was
uneven 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.