Building Diversity When Affirmative Action Is Banned

For top-flight American MBA programs hoping to enroll underrepresented minorities, last year was difficult, and nowhere more so than at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Only about 6% of an incoming class of 244 identifies as Black or Hispanic, the lowest share in the past 10 years, according to figures the school made public in its latest class profile.

Berkeley, like most of its peers, is drawing fewer US students these days, and underrepresented minorities— Black, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander students—have become even less represented on campus. This is true at most top MBA programs, according to data collected by Bloomberg Businessweek. Still, only the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business enrolled a share as low as Haas. (Because of the complexity—and ambiguity—in how schools collect and present racial demographic information, the figures reported here exclude the handful of multiracial people each year who identify as an underrepresented minority and may be a slight undercount.)