Workplaces diversify, then eye corner office

More minority students graduating from colleges and universities than ever before. A boom in entrepreneurship among African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. More wealth spreading throughout the economy, into nonwhite homes. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent by corporations to recruit and develop minority employees.

Judging by those changes, you'd think the US were making progress with diversity in the workplace. And it has been.

But even as experts assess the gains that have been made, particularly in the past decade, they are sounding a warning bell that rings from the halls of academia to the hustle of the workplace: Diversity is not a done deal.

Recent studies show that the US still has far to go if it is to develop a workforce that reflects, from top to bottom, the changing demographics of the country. At stake, they say, is America's competitive edge in an increasingly global marketplace with a customer base that is increasingly nonwhite.

"A lot of the conversations around diversity-training in some ways are missing the point," says Carl Van Horn, director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University and co-director of a survey on perceptions of race and discrimination in the workplace.

"It really isn't about training people to be aware of others, though that's not a bad thing," he says. "But ultimately [that's] not going to solve the problem." Correcting a lack of diversity, says Mr. Van Horn, ultimately calls for "action, not awareness."

Education and nonprofit organizations that track and encourage minority participation in business say that action has to come on many levels: persuading more minority students to sign up for undergraduate and graduate business-degree programs, increasing the diversity of business school faculties, and increasing their numbers in senior management positions in companies across the board.

Experts say that change needs to come primarily through two avenues: the classroom and the job.

A recent study by the Diversity Pipeline Alliance, a coalition of 11 national business and education groups working to increase minority representation in business, found that in the 1990s, minority students "walked away in droves" from undergraduate business programs.

The decline mirrored a similar decrease among white students, but the alliance was particularly concerned about minorities because they continue to be underrepresented in the business field. According to the report, minority students were choosing other programs – such as medicine, education, or life sciences – at three times the rate they were pursuing business degrees.

Nicole Chestang, chief operating officer and secretary of the Graduate Management Admission Council, the alliance's lead sponsor, says her coalition plans to dedicate itself to better educate minority students and their parents about what a career in business actually means.

"If we're interested in having a diverse class in the next decade," she says, "we need to start today. We need to educate young people about the opportunities involved and the required preparation to get there. We need to excite them about the benefits and the rewards."

Experts say that part of the way to increase minority interest in business-school programs is to increase the number of minority professors on campus – a total that currently stands at less than one minority professor per four-year school nationwide.

Since 1993, The PhD Project has worked to attract qualified minority workers back into academia to earn the doctoral degrees necessary to become a university professor. It has done so with strong support from corporate America.

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