Minority B-School Faculty Growing—Slowly

The number of underrepresented minorities on U.S. business school faculties is up, but the PhD Project, which advocates diversity, says it's not nearly enough

By Francesca Di Meglio

(Updates with total number of minority faculty at Texas A&M Mays Business School.)

American business schools, much like American businesses, have some catching up to do when it comes to minority hiring.

Stymied by a lack of minorities in the PhD pipeline and growing competition for minority faculty, progress in hiring African American, Hispanic American, and Native American faculty at U.S. B-schools has been slow. Bernard J. Milano, president of the PhD Project, an organization based in Montvale, N.J., that aims to increase the diversity of corporate America by increasing the diversity of business school faculty, says just 3.5 percent of B-school faculty and administrators come from such underrepresented minority groups. "When you think about the changing demographics of this country," Milano says, "that's tragic."

Since 1994, when the PhD Project launched, the number of underrepresented minorities—excluding Asian Americans—at U.S. business schools has more than tripled, from 294 to 1,061 in 2010. The number of underrepresented minority doctoral students grew from fewer than 175 to 385 over the same period, according to the PhD Project.

For B-schools, the lack of minorities among the faculty is a real problem, making it difficult to recruit minority students and to satisfy corporate recruiters seeking minority MBA talent."We like to be reflective of the world we live in," says Sachin Gupta, associate dean for academic affairs and professor of marketing at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management (Johnson Full-Time MBA Profile). "We want the community here to reflect diversity in the real world. This is important because it's what constituents—from students to recruiters—want."

Asians Well-Represented

At many schools, minority representation in the faculty ranks appears far more robust when all minorities, including Asians, are considered. For example, at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business (Marshall Full-Time MBA Profile), 27 percent of the 222 faculty members are minorities.Minorities represent 24 percent of the 96 faculty members at the Johnson School and 22 percent of 187 faculty members at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business (Ross Full-Time MBA Profile), according to data supplied by the schools. However, underrepresented minorities, excluding Asians, account for just 2.7 percent of the faculty at Marshall, 3.1 percent at Johnson, and 3.7 percent at Ross.

The greatest challenge for business schools, says Gupta, is the small supply of minorities with PhDs to hire, when the demand among the 1,600 business schools in the U.S. is so great. "The availability of well-trained, credentialed [underrepresented minority] faculty has grown over the years but remains small," says Gupta. "We're competing with schools for a small number of faculty."

Most top business schools have asked faculty search committees to broaden their searches, and many of them turn to organizations such as the PhD Project for help in finding qualified minority candidates for openings. At the Johnson School, search committees sometimes get extra money to allow them to broaden the search for minority candidates. Still, business schools say hiring decisions aren't made based on race, creed, ethnicity, or gender alone.