By Francesca Di Meglio

Deciding between enrolling in the full-time MBA program at Stanford Graduate School of Business or Duke University's Fuqua School of Business is hardly the worst predicament you could face -- especially if you thought you would never fit the business school mold at all. Just ask Shaquita Murphy, an African-American woman, who's choosing which of these prestigious programs to attend this fall. "I wouldn't have applied to any B-school if I hadn't found other people like me who were applying," says Murphy, who regularly consulted MBA Diversity, a grassroots effort by minority applicants who support each other through online forums, blogs, and meetings.

Murphy has a background in information technology but says she was worried that a nontraditional applicant such as herself would be rejected. The reality, however, is that Murphy is an admission director's dream: In addition to having strong qualifications, she's an African-American woman, a group that is blatantly under-represented from top B-school rosters.

Like Murphy, most of the latest round of B-school applicants are now receiving acceptance -- or rejection -- letters for this fall. And as the offers go out, the level of minority enrollment is a pressing concern for administrators at top schools. Enrollment of Asian Americans is strong, at around 15% to 25% for top MBA programs. But overall enrollment of under-represented minorities -- African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans -- has remained flat at about 10% at business schools, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

"OUTDATED TERM."  That figure is way below those groups' share of the population. Recruiting African Americans, who comprise 12% of the U.S. population and only about 7% of the U.S. B-school student body, is particularly difficult. Although the number of nonwhites taking the GMAT has steadily increased in recent years, the number of African Americans taking the exam dropped slightly in 2003, according to the Graduate Management Admissions Council. And some B-school insiders fear the effort to correct the balance is about to get even more difficult.

In December, 2003, two Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action -- the efforts to redress past discrimination by providing equal opportunities -- broadly determined that schools can use race as a factor in shaping their admissions programs, but the decisions also cautioned that race cannot be an overriding reason for admitting a candidate. Many minority students say the schools still have a lot of work to do. "Affirmative action was the first step, and now that that's become a somewhat outdated term, I don't want us to think, as we move forward as a nation, that we've solved the race issue because we haven't," says Kathryn Graves, co-president of the Black Business Student Association at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

The schools plan to keep trying. Many B-schools now use the term "diversity" rather than "affirmative action," which was often associated with racial and ethnic quotas. But the aim of diversity programs is still to attract more underrepresented minorities so that classrooms more closely reflect the makeup of society, says Tiffany Showell, director of Fellows & Alumni Programming for the Robert Toigo Foundation, a group that provides mentoring and career opportunities in finance to minorities.

FALLING NUMBERS.  Diversity, administrators believe, is necessary to prepare students to compete in an increasingly global, multiethnic, multiracial marketplace. It enhances classroom discussion and helps students relate to the growing number of African-American and Hispanic consumers. "We sincerely believe that you learn more from people who are different from you," says Derrick Bolton, assistant dean and director of MBA Admissions at Stanford GSB and an African American alumnus ('98) of the program.

Maintaining minority enrollment, however, can be a struggle. In 1999, Cornell University's S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management created the Office for Women & Minorities in Business to recruit minorities and provide diversity training for current students. Despite such initiatives, the Johnson School's underrepresented minority population dropped to 5% in 2004, half of what it was the year before, mostly because the competition for qualified minority candidates is heating up, says Angela Noble-Grange, director of the initiative.

Why do top B-schools have to fight so hard for such a small number of minority students? For starters, under-represented minorities continue to have lower high school graduation rates than whites -- which means many never go to college. In 2000, nearly 45% of all high school dropouts were Hispanic youth born outside of the U.S., and nearly 18% were African American, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

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