Back when Peter Aranda was an undergraduate, he was determined to earn an MBA. He just didn’t know how to swing it financially, said Aranda, now the CEO of the St. Louis-based Consortium for Graduate Study in Management.
“I was expecting to have to go to school part time and take five years to finish,” said Aranda, whose ancestry is a mix of Mexican, Native American (Cherokee and Otomi) and Jewish.
Instead, Aranda received a full-tuition, merit-based fellowship to Washington University’s Olin Business School from the consortium program, which he now leads. It’s a national coalition of U.S. business schools and corporations who advocate for diversity and inclusion in American business.
“I had lots of career opportunities that came out of the consortium,” said Aranda, who earned an MBA and masters in information management from Wash. U. “The first few companies I worked for were corporate supporters of the organization. I don’t know if I would have had those interactions and introductions otherwise.”
The consortium recently announced that the MBA class of 2014 will include 391 out of a record 1,038 applicants. The consortium’s member schools have also awarded $20 million in full-tuition, merit-based fellowships to 234 of the new MBA candidates.
The consortium’s vision is to work toward the day when African Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native Americans are no longer underrepresented in management careers in the U.S. business community. To achieve this, the consortium allows students who are committed to diversity to apply to all the member business schools through one application, and it also offers full-tuition, merit-based fellowships. Since its 1966 founding, the organization has awarded more than $250 million in such fellowships.
“Diversity is not a minority problem; it is an American opportunity,” Aranda said.
“The consortium is proud of its success in increasing the pipeline of multicultural and other executives committed to diversity. But we want to do more than level the playing field. We want to awaken business leaders to the role our graduates can play in helping companies survive and thrive in an increasingly multicultural marketplace.”
The consortium began just one year after the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Professor Sterling Schoen of Washington University in St. Louis envisioned a cooperative program that would develop African-American male MBAs. He sought and won an award for the project from The Sloan Foundation to conduct a feasibility conference. Sixty influential educators and leaders from the African American community participated in the conference and determined that such a program was both feasible and necessary.
The inaugural consortium class consisted of 21 African-American men, and the organization was supported by 27 corporate sponsors.
In June 2005, the organization’s mission evolved to include, as applicants, all U.S. citizens and permanent residents who can demonstrate a commitment to consortium’s mission – regardless of race or ethnicity.
Paul Danos, dean of the Dartmouth College Tuck School of Business and chairperson of the consortium’s board of trustees, said, “We are especially proud of our long affiliation with the consortium during this record-breaking year.”
New students receive virtually all-expenses-paid participation in the 46th Annual Orientation Program & Career Forum that took place June 10-13 in Minneapolis.
“It has been amazing,” said Marcus Theodore, a Washington University Olin Business School student and consortium fellow. “The consortium does a good job at centralizing information need to apply to MBA programs and future career positions.”
The conference offers new MBA candidates the chance to meet executives from its corporate partners well before the “official” recruiting season starts in the fall. Without ever having set foot on campus, incoming students can interview for, and possibly walk away with, summer jobs (for 2013) that may lead to full-time positions after graduation (in 2014). The consortium’s 80 corporate partners conduct roughly 1,000 interviews; and business school orientation sessions led by representatives of the students’ respective MBA programs.
