Chicago Booth Joins Diversity Consortium

A nonprofit dedicated to diversity and inclusion in graduate business education just gained a prestigious new member.

The University of Chicago Booth School of Business will join The Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, officials announced. This national nonprofit helps schools boost diversity in their master of business administration (MBA) programs with a long-term goal of diversifying corporate leadership.

Booth already has a long history of equity focus.

It was the first business school to establish a minority scholarship program in 1964 and later the first to establish an office dedicated to supporting historically underrepresented undergraduate student populations, according to the school’s press release.

Booth Dean Madhav V. Rajan said joining the Consortium will help the school diversify its student body and better serve students.

“As a member school, Booth hopes to enhance our efforts to increase the diversity of our student body and support the aspirations of our students so they can become successful leaders in business and government,” Rajan said in the release.

“We look forward to partnering with the Consortium and fellow member schools to support our shared mission.”

Booth’s move to join the Consortium comes as diversity efforts in higher education are under attack across the country — but also as business students are increasingly interested in diversity, equity, and inclusion in their programs.

“Dean Rajan and his team understand the importance of diversity to fostering robust inquiry and to addressing some of today’s most complex business challenges,” Consortium Executive Director and CEO Peter J. Aranda III said in the release.

“We look forward to joining forces to help them have even greater impact while advancing the Consortium’s mission to ensure equal opportunity in graduate management education and American business.”

Booth is only the latest major business school to join the Consortium. Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business joined the Consortium in April.

“A commitment to all forms of diversity is in our DNA at Fuqua, so a partnership with the Consortium aligns with our values,” Fuqua Dean Bill Boulding said in a press release at the time.

“Fuqua’s curriculum is built to develop leaders who can harness the strengths of diverse perspectives to truly innovate in working toward a common goal — and the diversity of our students’ backgrounds is key to making sure they learn from each other, in addition to our world-class faculty.”

Diversity and inclusion are key topics for prospective business students.

Around 82% of respondents in the 2024 Tomorrow’s MBA report from the consulting firm CarringtonCrisp said they were interested in embedded diversity, equity, and inclusion content within an MBA program. Students were also similarly interested in responsible management, ethical leadership, and global challenges.

“There is an element of employer demand here,” CarringtonCrisp co-founder Andrew Crisp previously told BestColleges.

“Employers are reacting to these issues in society and say: If we’re going to maintain the strong customer relationships we have, we have to understand our customers and where they are and the issues that are important to them. And, therefore, we need people who can come into our business with an understanding of these issues.”

CarringtonCrisp’s findings mirror those in the 2024 Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) Prospective Students Survey. That report found that prospective students largely said they wanted to see equity and inclusion in their business education.

For many, no equity and inclusion content was a dealbreaker.

“I am encouraged by how today’s candidate is aspiring and adapting to meet new global challenges in the forever-evolving business environment and really owning their career trajectory,” GMAC CEO Joy Jones said in a release at the time.

“It is creating enormous opportunities for business schools to satisfy the ever-changing demands of candidates and industry with a wide variety of degree offerings and course flexibility.”