Affirmative Action

Question

During an online chat session with an MBA admissions team today, I posed the question, "The Supreme Court will be revisiting the constitutionality of Affirmative Action later this year. To what degree does the School consider race in the admissions process? If affirmative action is overturned, how will it impact the School?"

At first I thought they were going to ignore my question, but finally responded by side-stepping and giving a b.s. response that didn't answer my question at all.

So I was curious what you all thought about the matter. How will it impact MBA programs and rankings?

shorttheworld · Answer

ill gladly be the first to step into this bullet

which im sure no one else will respond to because theyre worried about certain political correctness lol in a nutshell i doubt anything will change -- i think this happened in a way with the UC school system and the asians who were quota'd due to them getting into UCLA berkeley etc... and i think univ of michigan had a similar case but all they will do is go ahead and change the 'structure' from affirmative action to diversity inclusion or something and everything will be okay with the new laws they conjure up

im sure the adcom didnt want to answer since its obviously a very political subject. i cant see it changing the rankings at all... and programs such as consortium toigo forte etc will still exist even if the schools themselves got rid of any diversity initiatives they had prior.

mooze · Answer

Looking at this within the scope of "Affirmative Action" I think betrays a certain bias.

Race is certainly already a factor in society, the economy, business, and globalization (international students). In this context, if business schools did not include minority and international perspectives within their classes it would neccesarily mean a worse product.

So the problem is,..what happens when certain races have, on average, dramatically lower testing scores than their white or indian counterparts? At that point it becomes a judgement of whats more important between A) making sure every admitted student demonstrated to the same bar that he/she can intellectually handle the material or B) make sure the product (a b-school education) is as strong as possible with a diverse set of experiences and opinions. This is purely a business decision. With that in mind, the Supreme Court will not interfere with something it deems a legitimate business decision (unless the decision directly contradicts the constituition).

MBAorLust · Answer

I honestly do not think 'affirmative action' is as easy to point out in business schools as it is in law schools. Business schools like Stanford and many others look for people who 'fit' their school...it would be hard for someone to prove that they fit into a school but didn't get a place because of 'affirmative action'

novanative · Answer

I think there will always be some form of affirmative action for every school, one way or another. If it's not "race based", it could be "holistic review", etc. when a school says that no one factor will make or break your application.

Rankings won't change much. They never do. But AA that is more or less race intensive will probably just affect the US minority populations somewhat, but probably not like it does for college.

Affirmative Action

Prep Toolkit

Top 5 GMAT Debrief Videos

615 to 715 in 15 Days (Ria's Strategies)

More than Quant/Verbal Abilities: Speed vs. Accuracy

745 with Only Self-Prep and GMAT Club

From 555 to 765: 210-point Improvement

Perfect 805 Score Debrief by Julia

My Rewards