LazyBoy8
Nice Mahkie you overachiever you

that is great information. I am thinking (these are thoughts in isolation and very possibly dead wrong) that 1) they use the Consortium as a means to pool resources of the member schools. It is a lot easier to attract students dedicated to increasing diversity to one entitity than each individual school. 2) I think it allows schools such as Michigan, UCLA and Berkeley to circumvent the laws barring affirmative action.
I think you are right. On
this article at P&Q, they mention "The benefit to member schools, which ante up the money for the scholarship fund, is obvious". So it looks like schools pony up money somehow (maybe in proportion to program size?) to Consortium. In 2013, the amount was $24mm, and i've read somewhere the 2015 will be $28mm (don't hold me to this). This is divided by 18 member schools, so each school is putting down something like $1.5mm.
If each school is putting down $1.5mm, that's a lot of money, but not that large in the scheme of things for a top university. It would, as you say, allow them to provide a bunch of scholarships that are "softly" targeted at URMs, but that allow anyone who has shown some hustle to help those groups to also get the scholarships. Check out
the list of what top schools spend on scholarships. A lot of the big schools could easily drop that kind of money on minority recruitment.
Also, what's interesting from reading the Consortium annual report is that the number of alumni is hitting critical mass, and the OP is getting to be more and more popular with recruiters, who find it cost effective to pay big money to recruit there. Very exciting times for the Consortium.