Rethinking Ross: A Response

While I have no doubt that my views on the subject skew toward the positive direction, I feel as though the Ross School of Business has gained an exceedingly bad reputation on the University of Michigan campus. Entitled, arrogant, exclusive, competitive, are all words thrown around to describe the typical "Ross" student. This was exactly the picture of the Business School painted in a recent Michigan Daily Statement article titled Rethinking Ross. As a member of the Ross community, I take issue with being stereotyped and painted as "un-diverse" and all about "chasing the dollar"; where the Business School and its students get blamed for these supposed flaws, the conversation should be shifted to their solutions.

There is a perceived, and actual, lack of diversity within the Ross School of Business and, more generally, in business programs. This idea is highlighted in the Rethinking Ross piece:

There are plenty of opportunities for the Business School to grow, but perhaps none are more measurable as the lack of diversity in the program. In the most recent cohort of accepted students, just 4 percent of the Business School bachelor's degree program identified as an underrepresented minority. More remarkable is that that number is actually an improvement from each of the last two years.

This lack of diversity also stems further from just underrepresented minorities; the full BBA student profile indicates that only approximately 41% of accepted regular admissions students are female. The accepted discourse on the diversity topic around business programs is to blame them for this lack of diversity, essentially implying that business programs intentionally discriminate against minorities. However, there may be an underlying selection bias that can account for a great deal of this apparent marginalization.

A Wall Street Journal article titled Business Schools Short on Diversity outlines the selection bias that is apparent in the business school application process. They point out:

Enrollment number are only part of the issue, schools contend-applications from underrepresented groups are also low. Most schools don't break down their application data by race, but admissions consultants and other business-school insiders say those groups remain underrepresented in application pools too.

While there is know way of knowing exactly how much of the lack of diversity is explained by the lack of diverse applicants without the schools releasing the data themselves, it is clear that is has a significant impact on enrollment diversity. Opening up the conversation on encouraging these minorities to apply in greater numbers to business programs can have a significant impact on driving greater diversity in actual enrollment. Policies specifically designed to target and encourage minority group's interest in business can be much more effective than blaming business schools for discrimination.

In the same sense of shifting the conversation on encouraging minorities, there should be further conversations on discouraging those who attend business schools for job opportunities. While job security can definitely be a significant deciding factor for students who are choosing a major, it seems as though students are increasingly placing too much weight on this factor, causing them to feel dissatisfied with their coursework. Again, the Michigan Daily Statement article explains by interviewing a student and concluding:

"If your motives aren't right, like mine weren't—I saw dollar signs when I saw Ross"...[Faculty] also notice that, despite the favorable job and compensation prospects, business majors are regularly reported as among the least happy in school and the workplace nationwide.

One such example of this is a report from Business Insider which analyzes college majors that lead to jobs that are considered meaningful by the people who hold them; in the top 20 majors listed, not a single business discipline can be found. While the logical conclusion is that business is a dry, uninteresting field of work and study, I believe students find less satisfaction because they placed job placement as a deciding characteristic of choosing a major. Plenty of my colleagues in the business school, myself included, actually enjoy business courses; specifically my passion for financial markets was largest consideration in my application to the business school—job security was simply an added bonus. Creating conversations to downgrade the importance of job placement and upgrade the importance of satisfaction can realign the incentives and decision making process, potentially discouraging those who would have been miserable simply "chasing the dollar".