Survey Finds Business School Deans Believe a Great Deal of Effort Is Needed to Prepare Their Students for America’s Racially Diverse Work Force

A survey of business school deans conducted for the Ph.D. Project finds that 52 percent of the deans believe business schools are not doing an adequate job preparing their graduates to handle racial diversity issues in the workplace. A majority of the deans also responded that higher levels of minority faculty members have had a positive impact on recruiting black and other minority students and on the education and career mentoring of these students.

The Ph.D. Project is an organization seeking to increase the number of black and other minority faculty at the nation’s business schools. It is the position of the organization that hiring more minority professors will help business schools better prepare their graduates for the increasingly diverse work force that they will manage in the corporate world. Since the Ph.D. Project’s inception in 1994, the number of minority business school faculty has nearly tripled from 294 to 812. In addition, there are about 400 minority students in the business Ph.D. pipeline, most of whom will be seeking jobs in the academic world over the next five years.