The PhD Project Takes on Diversity From the Front of the Classroom

When it comes to philanthropy, b-schools usually are the ones cashing the checks, not cutting them. And, when it comes to recruiting, corporations want to lure new MBAs away from the campus, not send seasoned managers back to ivy towers to teach. But a rare juxtaposition of those roles is having a dramatic impact on the number of minorities entering business school Ph.D. programs, and promises to triple the number of new minority professors produced in the U.S. each year.

The juxtaposition began in 1994, when The PhD Project was born, the brainchild of KPMG, Citibank (now Citigroup), AACSB and The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC). The goal: To persuade minorities who are in early or mid-career to change course and pursue a life of research and teaching. In five years of existence, the project has evoked responses from 24,000 minorities who, after experiencing the fast track of commerce, have expressed curiosity about the life of a management scholar.

The project's sponsors say it is vital that minorities have the opportunity to consider the scholarly life because they are dramatically underrepresented in business education. One estimate, from William K. Laidlaw, Jr., AACSB's executive vice president, is that African-, Hispanic- and Native American minorities make up less than one percent of the full-time doctorally qualified business school faculty, while these groups make up approximately 18 percent of the U.S population. This doctoral deficit not only renders role models virtually invisible for minorities who could be talented teachers, but it also deprives majority students of the chance to view the world of business from non-white perspectives, supporters say.

"For years, corporate America has looked at the issue of who is in the classroom," said Peter Thorp, vice president of educational programs for Citigroup Foundation. "However, very little has been done to look at the issue of who's in front of the classroom."

Bernard J. Milano, KPMG's partner in charge of university relations and the driving force of The PhD Project, puts it more strongly. "White students learning from white faculty come to work for a company, and then, for the first time in their lives, they are working with or for an African-American. Is it any wonder that corporate America is spending a gazillion dollars on diversity awareness and diversity training? Running into all kinds of problems with discrimination issues? No. There's no wonder," he said.

Milano felt that strongly in the summer of 1993, when KPMG Foundation trustees asked him to name the most burning issue affecting the accounting profession. Without hesitation, Milano said it was diversity.

To illustrate his point, Milano shared a KPMG experience. A major client was offended when a team of all-white males walked into a final meeting with the company's audit committee. The client, a major retailer, has a customer base that is 99 percent multicultural females. "The client said, 'We're not quite sure how you can continue to service us because it's obvious your values are not reflective of our values,'" said Milano.

Milano told the trustees, "Our clients are wondering why our teams are all white. We can't find students of color who are studying accounting. And we're missing an entire population of African- or Hispanic-Americans out there. They are not looking at business, and consequently, we cannot look at them for employment."

On the basis of that assessment, the KPMG Foundation decided to rechannel a substantial portion of its resources into dealing with diversity in corporate America and asked Milano to come up with a workable approach.

He considers it serendipitous that the foundation trustees' directive came at the same time that he was involved as an AACSB board member in discussions about the future of two existing initiatives designed to bring minorities into business doctoral programs- the Minority Summer Institute (MSI), a collaborative effort of AACSB and GMAC offered at the University of Michigan, and the National Doctoral Fellowship Program in Business and Management (NDFP).

The goal of MSI had been to prime the pump for minority doctoral candidates by recruiting students between their junior and senior years of college for the summer institute. NDFP was designed to attract outstanding undergraduates in all kinds of majors, from liberal arts to engineering and psychology, into business doctoral programs.

"The activities of those two programs laid the groundwork for this project," AACSB's Laidlaw said. "We caught on to the idea of The PhD Project because we thought it would have a greater payoff in a shorter period of time. These people have a master's degree under their belt and are a quarter to one-third of the way to a doctoral degree. They already are working. They know the field, they've had work experience and they know a little about what it would be like to go back and be a faculty member."

MSI planted seeds that have sprouted in some of the individuals applying for The PhD Project, Milano said. "It's just that the germination period was so long that you'd have to be extremely patient to have waited for it. We're recognizing that you have to be planting seeds while you also pick the crop."

The work of picking the crop from the managerial ranks of American corporations began at meetings in September of 1993 and January of 1994 with KPMG, Citibank, AACSB and GMAC, plus some b-school deans and several minority doctoral students, minority faculty, and members of the National Black MBA Association.

Out of those two meetings, plus a follow-up in March of 1994, the planning group shaped the concept for recruiting and retaining qualified individuals interested in leaving the corporate world for academia.

The design of the project is two-pronged. First, there is an annual two-day conference for which prospective minority Ph.D. candidates/professors could apply. Second, there are doctoral student associations for each of the five business disciplines, to provide year-round peer support for every minority Ph.D. student.

The conferences, going into their sixth year, bring together the invited applicants, current minority Ph.D. candidates and minority business faculty. Panelists and speakers make presentations on the life and work of doctoral students and faculty members, and also spend time with the applicants, answering questions and exploring the pros and cons of academic life.

Representatives from any of the 106 doctoral program business schools are invited to attend if they are willing to pay their own expenses and pay a fee for the opportunity to participate.

The idea of school participation at the conference occurred to Milano while attending the National Black MBA Association meeting. There he saw information booths staffed by various b-school representatives encouraging members who did not yet have an MBA to apply to their programs.

Milano was told that Ph.D. programs don't recruit because they have many more applicants than they can take. "I said, 'There's something missing if we run a conference and we don't have individual schools there for the potential candidates to talk to. We'd be missing an entire opportunity,'" he said.

The first invitation Milano sent to the universities garnered 31 responses. He sent another letter attaching a list with the names of the 31 b-schools that wanted to participate. "Within two weeks, we were up to 67," he said. The number of schools that now participate in the annual conferences is 75 or more.

The second prong of the project, minority doctoral student associations, surfaced as an urgent need after the planning group heard from several students and faculty about how lonely and isolated they felt in graduate school.

"The urgency was that there already were minorities in doctoral programs, however few, and that if we didn't do something immediately, we were running the risk of people dropping out. While trying to increase the numbers, it was critical that we do something to maximize the completion rate of those already in programs," said Milano.

The student associations and the annual conference cost about $1.7 million to fund. The expenses for the invited applicants at the two-day conference alone run between $2,500 to $3,000 each, Milano said. The project also covers doctoral students' attendance at their annual professional association meetings, as well.

The KPMG Foundation provides $800,000 of the budget each year. Besides Milano's time on the project, which he said "should" represent about 10 to 15 percent of what he does, there also are three full-time and one half-time KPMG Foundation staffers who work on the project. AACSB gives $25,000 annually and GMAC $150,000. About 13 corporate sponsors, including Citigroup Foundation, DaimlerChrysler, Mobil-Exxon, and Texaco donate varying amounts.

Reasons for Support
Like any program looking for funding, The PhD Project has to sell itself. It's rare that a non-profit organization like AACSB would use members' money to fund programs other than its own. But AACSB's board saw good reason to contribute. First, Laidlaw said, The PhD Project pursued a cause that AACSB was committed to but could not afford to fund alone. Second, the project not only brings people into doctoral programs, it also advances other interests of the association.

"We want to see faculty members have more real-world experience," Laidlaw said, "and everybody we recruit for The PhD Project has real-world experience, so right away you begin to marry practical experience with the academic. Second, we want to achieve a better balance between teaching and research, and if you have people with a business background who go on to get a Ph.D., those people will have a better appreciation for and provide a better balance between their teaching and research activities."

B-school deans have been frustrated for years in their search for doctorally qualified minorities, Laidlaw said, so it is not difficult for most of them to see the value of participating in the project.

"Not only did we put some of our members' money into this," Laidlaw said, "but we also wrote to all of the doctoral programs and asked them to support this project. There are 75 or so putting money in each year. It's very unusual. They pay for the right to come and exhibit at the annual conference." For their participation, the schools also receive a CD-ROM with data on all of the conference applicants, not just those invited.

For the b-schools, the rationale for paying up is not only the opportunity to recruit candidates for their own Ph.D. programs, but also, in the longer term, having a larger pool of minority business doctors to hire from.

"The typical lament you hear from deans," Laidlaw said, "is, 'I go looking and can't find them'; or, 'I can't get them to come to my school.' For years business schools turned out 25 minority Ph.D.s a year. Now they are going to be turning out three times that. I think the deans who do the recruiting for faculty will have a much larger pool to choose from in the future," he said.

A major objective of The PhD Project will be more people of color in front of the classroom. "We think that will attract more people of color as students. It will happen in lagged fashion, as these faculty members take their positions," Laidlaw said. "Ultimately, those who have been students will move on and move into corporate America. And that's exactly what the corporations have wanted and that's why we are getting such support from the corporations."

Arlene Lawson, executive director of the Mobil Foundation for U.S. Activities, said her foundation approached Milano in early 1998, after hearing about The PhD Project from a former employee.

"Our feeling is that the overriding issue is to have available to corporate recruiters a diverse student body because we want to recruit from a pool that reflects the population of the United States. The way to do that is having faculty members who can act as mentors or role models for students," she said.

Should companies fear the loss of good managers to The PhD project? Monica Emerson, director of diversity and work/family at DaimlerChrysler Corporation, said employees always make personal decisions about their futures with a great deal of thought. "We have not felt as if The PhD Project is pulling away our talent. We don't see it as a competing initiative at all," she said. Her company has contributed to the last four annual conferences because of its interest in increasing African-American representation in b-school faculty.

"We believe that when there is diversity in the business schools that are developing the minds of our future employees and leaders," Emerson said, "we as a corporation will benefit, and, in fact, the nation will benefit. It's not just an initiative to increase African-American representation. We really believe that all students going through business schools need the diverse educational exposure. It's not just diversity with the students; it also is diversity in the professorial staff."

Given The PhD Project's newness in the market of worthy causes, however, and its long-term nature, it can be difficult for some potential sponsors to grasp the value.

"An awful lot of corporate philanthropic efforts have a much shorter focus, and if you can't make change within 24 or 36 months, you go somewhere else," Thorp said. "This effort takes a long-term commitment. You just must have a willingness to stay the course because you can't make change in less than six to seven years at the earliest. We've got to have the patience to understand that we've got to get people through the pipeline."

That pipeline, according to the KPMG Foundation, now holds 380 African-, Hispanic- and Native American business doctoral candidates. If all 380 receive Ph.D.s, they would double the current number of minority doctoral professors in U.S. b-schools.

Will The Minority Professors Be There?
No one argues against diversifying the faces of U.S. management professors. The question has been, "How?" How do you find good prospects? How do you supply them with the information they need? How do you keep them in the game through the grueling course of doctoral work? How do you make academic life as attractive, or more so, than corporate life?

Milano, and other major supporters, say that The PhD Project has found a workable solution for those questions.

"There is no downside to this," Milano said. "From Washington, you get all the rhetoric and backlash about affirmative action, but here is a program that is making a significant difference in the career choices of minorities. It is not about quotas, it is not about changing standards, it is not about giving preferences. We have a program that is absolutely about people who are fully credentialed and fully qualified to get in. Tenured faculty are not going to let anyone slide through a doctoral program. That is not the way the academy works."

To reach interested minorities, the project aligned itself with organizations and publications that already had inroads into minority communities.

"We called the NBMBA Association and said, 'Would you allow us to use your member database? Keep in mind that, in doing so, what you're doing is encouraging people to quit their jobs,'" Milano recalled. "The NMBA has many people from corporate America on its board and they understood the power of what we were trying to accomplish. They immediately said, 'Absolutely.'"

Other entry points came through the databases of the Hispanic MBA Association, the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management and the list of minority test takers from GMAC. The advertising agency Milano hired also placed ads and articles in publications like Black Enterprise Magazine, Minority MBA, Essence, Hispanic Times Magazine and Winds of Change, a publication for Native Americans.

"We started the first year with about 20,000 minorities in our database, so we knew we could do a very focused direct mail campaign," Milano said. That campaign surfaced responses from 3,000 individual minorities. "It really shocked us. We had been told that the small percent of minorities who went to college and had corporate jobs were not interested in giving that up."

Alisa Mosley, a '98 Ph.D. graduate from the University of Nebraska's b-school and now an assistant professor in management at Jackson State University, was one who saw an ad in Black Enterprise. She had been working about a year as a manager of vendor relations for Sprint in the Dallas metropolitan area.

"The ad was thought-provoking because it talked about reaching for a higher goal," Mosley said. "It appealed to me because I had been in industry for a relatively short time, but I had done enough at my job to know that I was probably looking for something more meaningful."

Mosley and all 3,000 who responded received a copy of AACSB's "Guide to Doctoral Programs in Business and Management," which shows what schools offer doctorates in what disciplines. "When those invited came to the conference, they already were much up to speed on research and had targeted x number of schools they wanted to talk to," Milano said.

Tom Lopez, assistant professor of accounting at Texas A&M University since January of 1998, was already in the business doctoral program at Arizona State University at the time The PhD Project was starting. "I went out and collected information from scores of Ph.D. programs around the country, which is a pretty difficult thing to do and pretty expensive," he said. "The project does this all at one shot for people in two days, while I collected information for months."

Of the first group of 3,000, 570 applied for admission to the conference. Every application was reviewed for evidence of the quality of academic preparation sufficient to get into a doctoral program. Half of the 570 were invited, and of those, 266 attended, well exceeding the target of 200 set for the first year. The second year, 800 applied and the new target of 300 also was surpassed, as was the case in the following years.

The profile of those invited to the conferences is diverse, but not by design. The project uses 14 different application reviewers, who select on the basis of qualifications only.

Among the 400 invited to the 1998 conference, there was a 50-50 split between male and female. The ages were fairly evenly divided and ranged from about 20 percent under 26 years, to 10 percent over 46 years.

Five years after the project's inception, one person who attended the first conference has graduated from a doctoral program. Altogether, Milano said, about 22 minorities completed business doctoral degrees in 1998, and another 69 started.

"Two facts we know," Laidlaw said. "In a normal doctoral program there is a 25 percent dropout rate. Among The PhD Project enrollees, it is less than five percent. If we project a five percent loss rate on the number who have enrolled, we know we are going to be turning out, conservatively, three times as many minority faculty members per year, starting next year, as was the case for the previous 20 years."

The key to the low dropout rate is the student associations. Every minority individual in the program has a nationwide network of supporters who persist in encouraging and coaching anyone whose morale goes down.

Each of the five management disciplines has its own association that distributes a directory of names, addresses, phone, Email, work history and area of interest, so that students can find associates for team study, moral support or research feedback.

Lopez said his roughest time came in the proposal stage of his dissertation. "I recall on numerous occasions feeling that it just wasn't worth it. My friends in the student association would say, 'Listen, don't let this get you down, this is common. Just fight through it. Whatever you do, just don't stop working.'

"I think things like that are what make our attrition rate so low, compared to the average across the country," Lopez said. "We have the feeling of community among all of the students. Nobody is going to fail. The big thing about the project is not just getting people in, it's making sure they finish, too."

Mosley said the student association gave her a network of help that she had never experienced before. In her dissertation phase at Nebraska, she participated in weekly Email progress reports with another candidate in New Jersey, who was in the same phase of his program. "We talked about the process and what we had accomplished that week. I knew that every Sunday I had to have something to say, and it was really helpful because when you're writing a dissertation it is you against yourself. I knew at least that I had someone else who was working just like I was," she said.

Lopez has been a panelist or speaker at all of the conferences, offering his perspective on the life of a minority doctoral student, as well as new faculty member. He had been an accountant with Coopers & Lybrand in California when he went to ASU.

"Most people entering doctoral programs are professionals and they are giving up sometimes very substantial paychecks to receive almost nothing," he said. "Issues like that are important for people trying to make a decision about whether they really want to do that. They have to prepare themselves to make that transition so the stress is not made more unbearable with financial problems."

At the conferences, the prospective doctoral students have a chance to talk with presenters and panelists as equals, getting their first taste of academic collegiality. "You can really ask the questions you want to ask, about real life decisions," Mosley said.

Ph.D. candidates leaving their corporate careers do face the issue of how to fund their tuition, plus living expenses for them and their families. KPMG is one company that provides direct scholarship help for minority Ph.D. students, Milano said, but the larger the number grows, the more costly such scholarships become. Schools tell Milano that they have resources to fund minority students in doctoral programs. The schools, he said, report that they have corporate partners who are looking for ways to improve diversity and attract minorities, and are therefore willing to help fund the education for minority Ph.D.s.

The Project's Impact In The Future
"If I rated the importance of this project on a scale of 1 to 10, as far as what management education and corporations need, it's probably got to be a 10," said Milano, quickly acknowledging his bias.

Diversity is not a social "do good" or "sound good" concept, Milano insists. "It's absolutely a business issue. And the preparation of white students is a key element."

Mosley found that to be true in her experience as a teaching assistant at Nebraska. Most of her classes were all white, and at first she found a great deal of uneasiness between her and the students, which she got past by asking for coaching from faculty and other teaching assistants.

After the teacher-student relationship formed, Mosley said, the diversity issues began to come up naturally. Students would bring in articles about things companies were dealing with and ask her what she thought.

"I think they realized that these were issues they were really going to have to know about, and they knew they had someone in me who wasn't going to put them down or get upset with them. We talked about affirmative action, sexual harassment and other issues of discrimination that relate to people of color, especially in organizations," Mosley said. "With a white male, it might not even come up as an issue."

Another impact that Lopez has noted in his brief teaching experience is that undergraduate Hispanic students are coming to see him during his office hours to discuss their classwork and how to be successful. He had four times as many Hispanic students in his intermediate accounting class than did any of the other professors teaching that class.

"I was happy to see that," Lopez said. "I don't want students shying away from other professors, but I am hopeful that I was bringing them into accounting rather than taking them from another professor."

In considering the possible impact of The PhD Project, the long-term nature of the effort comes up as both a plus and a minus.

For DaimlerChrysler's Emerson, it is a plus. "More and more we like to consider our investments to be strategic and long-term because we believe that's where you really maximize your benefit to the organizations you support, as well as the company. For the foreseeable future, we see ourselves continuing to support the project," she said.

But Citigroup's Thorp sees the long-term nature as a sort of barrier to more companies' participation. "This is a much broader responsibility effort. It's societal, it's good for business, it's good for this country, but there are some organizations that have a more narrow focus, and if it doesn't benefit the business in the wink of an eye, then it doesn't pass through their screen. That is a barrier. We have to work around and through the long-term nature of it. We can't change the gestation period," he said.

After some of the minority students receive their Ph.D.s, will they be lured back to the corporate world by the promise of more money? "We don't know the answer to that," Laidlaw said. "But they started out in the corporate world and decided to go back to the lifestyle and culture of the academy. My guess is that most will want to stay."

For those that fully commit to academia, will there be enough faculty jobs? Neither Milano nor Laidlaw express any doubt about minority faculty finding jobs.

"No question," Laidlaw said emphatically. Even though doctoral faculty vacancy rates have more often tipped down than up in the last several years, he believes that having the combination of a Ph.D. and member of a minority is a certain ticket to a faculty post. "They'll array themselves over a whole variety of schools and levels of quality, but there is a market there," he said.

Milano said people sometimes ask him if the project helps graduates find jobs. His response to them is "You've got to be kidding! Get out of the way!

"If you are one of the few African-Americans coming out with a doctorate in marketing, finance or whatever, you're going to have your choice of wherever you want to go," he said.

What about the commitment of a company such as KPMG and Milano himself? He said he does not know who will take over if he ever decides to leave, but he believes that someone else in the firm would step in. Possibly, after it is running so smoothly, AACSB or GMAC would take over administration of the program. "Our sponsors are part of the steering committee and we come together twice a year to make sure we all understand what we're doing, why we're doing it and how we're doing it," he said.

Milano doesn't foresee any corporate sponsor having the resources or infrastructure to take it over. "I don't see any other program any where that reaches out and partners with higher education and other corporations. This is unique in its collaborative nature and being owned by a for-profit corporation," he said.

How will the sponsors know when the project's purpose is fulfilled?

"I think the end game would be that we have a fair representation of minorities teaching," said Milano. "Then non-minority students for the first time in their lives perhaps will have the opportunity to be exposed to someone not like themselves who is in a position of authority and responsibility. They will be much better prepared to work in corporate America than they presently are. It's like priming a pump. At some point there will be a natural flow, there will be a natural regeneration of minorities into business faculty positions."