Image: National Museum of African American History and CultureThere were a few reasons for the UC-Berkeley Haas School of Business to be happy with its recently released MBA Class of 2020 profile. At 291 students, it’s the biggest class in school history; the average GMAT (726) ticked up a point, the average undergrad GPA (3.66) stayed steady, and the school reached its highest percentage of female students (43%) since 2014 — even as overall applications dropped 7.5% from last year.
But in one big way, the Berkeley Haas fall 2018 intake disappoints — and it’s a major disappointment that has school officials flummoxed and students and alumni shocked, angered, and calling for change. African-American student enrollment has fallen off a cliff: Just six African-American students are enrolled in the Haas MBA program this fall.
Six students in a class of 291 is 2.1%; more importantly, it represents a 68% drop in two years, from an all-time high of 19 enrollees in 2016. So what is happening? The problem is not in applications. In fact, the number of African-American and other black applicants to Haas had grown steadily for the last 10 years, according to school officials, before dropping in 2018 along with applicants from most other demographics. No, the real problem for Haas has been enrolling the African-American students it admits: In the past five years the Haas MBA program has admitted between 23 and 39 African Americans and enrolled an average of about 11 (the 10-year average is around eight). The school has a yield problem: to admit 27 African-American students in 2018 and have only six enroll translates to a 22.2% yield rate, far lower than the overall Haas yield of 50.9%.
A DIVERSITY DRIVE THAT HAS GONE SIDEWAYS, AND A CALL FOR CHANGE
Angela Steele, a co-founder of the Race Inclusion Initiative at Berkeley Haas and a 2016 MBA. Haas photo
You wouldn’t know Haas has a problem just by looking at its class profile. In fact, Haas is more transparent than most schools, listing different stats for under-represented minorities (11%) and U.S. minorities (38%), the latter of which includes Asian students. (Some schools are happy to conflate the two, thus artificially inflating their diversity cred.)
But there is indeed a problem — and Haas students saw it coming. That’s why, in 2016, they launched the Race Inclusion Initiative to address race and ethnicity issues and improve the Haas experience for underrepresented minorities (URMs).
The effort was timed to be part of the school’s then-new strategic plan. Angela Steele, who finished her MBA that year, helped found the RII; she tells Poets&Quants it was initially a great success, as organizers enlisted faculty mentors and conducted surveys, focus groups, and roundtables to find areas that needed change, all in an atmosphere of support and encouragement from the Haas School and the wider university. Contemporaneous efforts emerged, too, including a student-led course called Dialogues on Race, a Diversity Digest newsletter, a Haas Perspectives Blog, and a Humans of Haas podcast.
In the fall of 2016, Haas enrolled its most-ever African-American MBA students: 19. But since then, Steele says, the drive for diversity and inclusion at Haas has gone sideways.
“We saw a lot of progress under the admissions leadership of Stephanie Fujii and Erin Kellerhals,” says Steele, who served as VP of diversity on the MBA Association as a student and who has continued doing admissions diversity work after graduation, in particular through the Haas Alumni Diversity Council (HADC), an advisory body. “Every class since 2016 has carried on that work, continuing to do research and make recommendations, but one of the major issues at Haas is that they have not made a commitment to diversity and inclusion in the way that we see many other schools doing.”
A CALL FOR A NEW ADMISSIONS OFFICER
Olivia Anglade. Courtesy photo
Steele emphasizes that she does not speak for the HADC — she and others just “care deeply about the current and future experiences of students at Haas.” It’s that concern that has led them to call for more than a change in how the school attracts and maintains African-American student talent. They’re calling for bigger changes in admissions leadership, too.
“Something needs to be done,” says Steele, one of P&Q’s 2016 MBAs To Watch who is currently senior project manager at NewCourtland Senior Services in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “The reality is, students and alumni have been doing a lot of work for the school quietly in the background for a long time, and we are still facing a reality where in two years, if trends continue, there could be no black students in the full-time MBA program at Haas.
“We are calling for a director of diversity in admissions and an Admissions Diversity Committee. Addressing black enrollment must be a top priority for both, along with developing a DNI strategy with the dean. And we are calling for the hiring of an admissions director of diversity, with demonstrated experience and success in enrolling racially diverse classes.” Steele points to some peer schools, including Michigan Ross, Northwestern Kellogg, and the Wharton School, where admissions officers of color show the schools’ commitment to diversity. “That is sorely lacking at Haas, and the school is relying on a lot of student labor and alumni labor to do the work of what an admissions officer should be doing.”
Olivia Anglade, also a 2016 Haas MBA and current member of the HADC, agrees that Haas’ admissions leadership must be held to account. A new admissions director of diversity should create a partnership between staff, students, and all stakeholders “to increase transparency and accountability.” And he or she could reverse the self-defeating trend in which Haas finds itself, where prospective students see a negative atmosphere based on the absence of a strong community, perpetuating that absence.
“There is a network effect now — this idea that, ‘If there are only 10 black students in the class before me, what should I be thinking about my community and who is going to be around me when I go?'” says Anglade, a co-founder of the RII who also worked in student government as the VP of admissions, in which role she worked closely as the student liaison between current and prospective students. She’s now a San Francisco-based consultant for Boston Consulting Group. “I would say that you had the opposite effect, you had a positive effect, in the Class of 2018. The 19 of them could see each other and say, ‘Come to Haas and meet folks like ourselves.'”
HAAS ADMISSIONS DIRECTOR: HAAS NEEDS MORE SCHOLARSHIPS
Morgan Bernstein became Haas’ executive director of full-time MBA admissions in March 2016. While some have pointed out that her tenure has coincided with the decline in African-American representation in the MBA program, she responds by noting that African Americans make up only about 7% of Graduate Management Admission Test takers, adding that over the last 10 years Haas’ average enrollment of African-American students was only around eight. In other words, the numbers have never been stellar — but Bernstein agrees that this year’s enrollment of six is troublingly low.
“It’s something that we’re trying to look into,” she tells P&Q. “Here at Haas, we have to figure out a way to encourage more African-American students to explore what business school can do for them.” Nor is the problem exclusively about black students: Haas’ diversity struggle extends to other URMs, as well. Latino enrollment in the full-time MBA this fall is 13 students, the highest in more than five years — but that’s out of 38 admits, a yield of just 34%. Native-American enrollment this fall is three. Last fall it was zero.
Among the challenges Haas faces in attracting and enrolling more African-American and other URM candidates to the MBA program: regional preference, Bernstein says, with West Coast schools at a disadvantage in drawing underrepresented minorities out of the New York metro area where they most heavily reside.
But that is not the only challenge.
“Peer schools have increased their scholarship packages compared to Haas, and so we have to figure out how to respond,” Bernstein says, noting that Haas awards no scholarships on the basis of race, ethnicity, citizenship, or gender. This helps explain the yield problem: A student receiving offers to multiple schools is far more likely to choose the one that offers financial assistance. “You know, all the schools are competing for the same small group of applicants, and so that makes it a really competitive process. But we know that scholarship offerings must increase.”
Olivia Anglade participating in a diversity roundtable at the Haas School in 2016. Haas photo
Before Laura Tyson, Berkeley Haas’ interim dean, took the reins from outgoing Dean Rich Lyons, she asked him what major issues she should confront during her limited deanship. “He talked about this issue,” Tyson tells Poets&Quants, “about the ongoing effort of Haas to increase under-represented minority enrollment, and about the fact that we’d had basically two really disappointing years in enrolling African Americans, and that he had been working with the students. Students had come to him with a variety of recommendations of things that we might do. And he said to me they were largely things we either are doing now or things we will implement in the summer.”
Of underlying causes for the downturn in African-American enrollment, Tyson, dean until January when newly hired Ann Harrison takes the reins, says, “I really can’t explain it.” She will receive a report from an “action plan group” of school stakeholders on October 5. She says she expects to make the plan public. It will include “everything we possibly can do right away, now, not long-term but right away now. To increase the number of applicants we have, to identify them, to sell Haas to them, to make sure that we have as a priority to increase the number of African-American students at Haas.”
On the matter of scholarships, “We don’t have adequate funding for scholarships, period,” Tyson says.
ADMINISTRATION EXPRESSES FULL COMMITMENT TO GREATER DIVERSITY
Laura Tyson, interim Haas dean: Admissions team is dedicated, “but the results have been disappointing.” Haas photo
In an email to students earlier this month, Tyson wrote that
over the last “four months,” Haas senior staff, the admissions team, the full-time MBA program office, and the school’s new director of inclusion and diversity, Élida Bautista, “have been actively working on this issue. The work of the Race Inclusion Initiative has provided welcome input into the process, resulting in several new actions that are already being implemented. But more must be done and now is the time to commit to concrete plans.
“Therefore,” Tyson continued, “I have tasked Jay Stowsky, Senior Dean of Instruction, and Courtney Chandler, Senior Dean and Chief Operating Officer, to report back to me within 30 days with a schoolwide action plan to combat the factors in the way of achieving our shared vision of a diverse student body that meets the standards we all expect of Berkeley Haas.”
Chandler and Stowsky told students in a subsequent email that the school’s initial actions would focus on three primary objectives: Rebuild trust with underrepresented minority students, alumni, and allies; make Haas a community that African-American and all underrepresented minority students want to join; and, simply, increase the number of African-American students at Haas.
“We are fully committed,” they wrote, “to making Berkeley Haas the welcoming, inclusive, and diverse community we will all be proud of.”
REBUILDING TRUST
Steele says the problem isn’t that Haas is a place African-American students don’t want to come. On the contrary, she insists, they do — and the school is, moreover, a much-sought-after destination for other URM students.
“People have rightfully asked why there was no uproar or articles written when our LatinX numbers where so embarrassingly low for so long, and I think that is fair,” Steele says. “My personal feeling is that, as a student in 2014, I naively thought that if we just kept working behind the scenes we could activate change, and I had to realize our limitations.”
Students have made great change at Haas, however, as Steele points out: “Remember that it was the student activism of the Gender Equity Initiative that pushed Haas to move from 30% to over 40% women in the full-time MBA program, and, while we celebrate the 13 LatinX students in the Class of 2020, remember that the Class of 2016 had just four. Without qualified DNI professionals in admissions and a strategy, these trends could also reverse.”
Steele and Olivia Anglade also took issue with Tyson’s framing of the work as starting “four months ago,” saying it misses the mark. Anglade wrote a letter to Dean Lyons in August 2017 expressing dismay about the decrease in black enrollment in the Class of 2019. “I said, ‘Look, our class size is growing, but the numbers of black students are going down.’ And I had conversations with Dean Lyons as well as Morgan, and I asked, ‘What are we doing as a class, and what are we doing as an administration?’ And since then the numbers have gotten worse, but not because students aren’t working on the problem.”
“We started RII in 2016 in part because Haas was writing a new five-year strategic plan and we wanted a DNI Initiative to be a part of it,” Steele says. “We know change can come in fits and starts and takes time. However, students and alumni have been doing this work and pushing the dean and admissions for years, and to ‘rebuild trust’ the school must acknowledge that.”
‘COMMITTED TO GETTING THIS RIGHT’
Dean Tyson acknowledges the significant investment by Haas students to increase diversity in the full-time MBA, and she acknowledges that the outcome “has been such a disappointment. It has clearly been disappointing. This admissions team is dedicated, but the results have been disappointing. And that’s why I asked for the action plan, to try to look at every part of the process. And all the rest of this year we are going to be implementing everything, literally everything, we can think of. We’re getting advice from the campus, we’re looking at what other schools have done, we’re looking at the recommendations of the students from last year.
“We want to make sure that Haas is a community that these students want to join,” Tyson says, adding that she’s inclose communication with incoming Dean Ann Harrison on all these matters. “It is so inclusive — it’s the defining principle here, it’s the culture. And that is what I want to make sure is communicated.”
Adds Bernstein: “I think ultimately we’re committed to getting this right, we are trying to follow through on having an inclusive environment. It’s part of our mission and culture, and creating a diverse community is an important part of preparing our students to lead in a diverse world.”
But change, Steele says, “should not be driven by the fear of failures being exposed. I hope Dean Tyson and Dean Harrison will be committed to progress and to holding the administration and admissions accountable.”
Morgan Bernstein, Berkeley Haas executive director of full-time MBA admissions: “Ultimately, we’re committed to getting this right, so we are trying to follow through on having an inclusive environment.” File photo
UC-Berkeley Haas School of Business is a member of The Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, a half-century-old alliance of top U.S. business schools and corporations aimed at fostering diversity among graduate business students and corporate leaders. There are 20 member schools, including Cornell Johnson, Yale SOM, Michigan Ross, and Dartmouth Tuck. Haas’ membership in The Consortium, however, has been different from the rest: It is the only school to leave the alliance and return, having been a member from 1993 to 2003, then leaving, only to return seven years later.
The reason for the interregnum was Proposition 209, the California law that prohibits public institutions from participating in programs that give preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. Haas was able to rejoin The Consortium only after the alliance expanded its mission beyond efforts to help African-American students and future leaders to include fellowships for any U.S. citizen who demonstrates a commitment to advancing diversity and inclusion in academia and the boardroom.
Effectively, what may have seemed like making a bigger tent actually watered down The Consortium’s efficacy in promoting true diversity in B-schools, says Victoria Williams-Ononye, a current Haas student who will finish her MBA in 2019. She says Haas’ appeal for African Americans has been dimmed by its fealty to Prop. 209 — and she adds that the administration can’t claim to have been unaware of the growing problem, and has only itself to blame for getting caught so flat-footed on the shockingly low 2018 enrollment numbers.
“In the fall of 2017, the administration failed to act on the concerns raised by URM students that numbers had decreased, leaving us on an island,” Williams-Ononye tells P&Q. “The administration puts so much emphasis on Prop. 209 and ensuring that URM applicants aren’t given any preferential treatment, that they have failed to realize the barriers that they are presenting to URM applicants, more specifically, Consortium applicants.”
‘THIS NEEDS TO BE A BROADER CONVERSATION’
Sydney Thomas: It’s past time for a strictly campus conversation. Courtesy photo
Sydney Thomas, a former liaison to The Consortium, finished her MBA in 2016. She was one of the founders of the Haas Gender Equity Initiative, upon which the Race Inclusion Initiative was partly modeled. She also served as co-chair of the Haas Women in Leadership Conference.
Currently an investor and builder at San Francisco Bay Area-based private equity and venture capital firm Precursor Ventures, Thomas says all those initiatives and efforts from 2015 and 2016 were in service to the same overarching goal: to have a campus-wide conversation that created a welcoming place for women and under-represented minorities. And they had a practical goal, too.
“It was about doing the most that we can to really get folks here, to understand the importance of a funnel of applicants, how essentially the funnel is from when somebody’s told about Berkeley to getting them actually on campus,” Thomas tells P&Q. When she heard from a friend that the number of African-American students in the 2018 intake had fallen to six, she was heartbroken. “I was just like, ‘This is crazy.’ And she was like, ‘It’s so sad, because we’ve done so much work and I’m just exhausted and I just don’t really know what else to do.'”
Thomas got in touch with the school. She says she was urged to meet with the director of inclusion and diversity and the admissions team, but declined. “We’re already too far past that,” she says, “where that conversation is going to be sufficient. I think that if you can’t figure out how to get the numbers up by the time the students actually come to campus, we’re going to have to do a talk about this. Not just on campus, but this needs to be a broader conversation.”
HAAS STUDENT: NUMBERS ARE LOW, BUT ‘COMMUNITY IS VERY INCLUSIVE’
Victoria Williams-Ononye, current Haas MBA student: Students are “horrified by this crisis.” Courtesy photo
Students sounded the alarm, Williams-Ononye says.
“It wasn’t until our student and alumni community more strongly voiced our collective worry that the administration started taking even basic steps in the right direction — updating the website, engaging in implicit bias training, evaluating the application questions, etc.,” she says.
“However, this is not a one-time blip, but rather a downward trend that will require more structural changes to be made. More so, I believe the administration is placing too much of an emphasis on pipeline. While a pipeline problem does exist in education more generally, a class of less than 10 black students is more reflective of the flawed admissions process and the way the school presents itself to applicants of color than a pipeline problem. The administration, particularly the leadership in admissions, must take responsibility for its results and be willing to reflect on the meaning of a process that matriculates such low numbers of Black, Latinx, and Native-American students. We have given the administration concrete recommendations on how to move forward, most notably including the hiring of a director of diversity in admissions and a multi-stakeholder group of alumni, students, and faculty that support and hold the admissions team accountable.
“Those of us closely involved with this work are incredibly frustrated by the situation, but we find hope in our classmates who are also horrified by this crisis and have amplified URM student concerns. While the numbers are low, the Haas student community is very inclusive, and it is my hope that we are able to show URM prospective students that they can find a home at Haas.”
That’s not what prospective students see now, Steele says.
“I was at a Management Leadership for Tomorrow event in Philadelphia and sharing my experience at Haas — I had a wonderful experience at Haas — but the questions I was getting really showed me what a crisis we are in in regards to recruiting and retaining under-represented minorities, and especially black students,” Steele says. “Black students were asking me, ‘Is Haas a safe place? We know there are no black students at the school. What is admissions doing? Am I going to be OK?’ They were getting at the inclusion part. The reality that we have right now is, there are six black students. So what is the reality for a black student? It’s going to be isolating, alienating, and prospective students are seeing that.
“This is a crisis, and we need to act. And we need to speak out.”
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