Business Education for Blacks

Recognizing the importance of expanding opportunities for minority persons, the Tuck School in 1964 began an intensive effort to recruit blacks and other minority groups. Now it has joined with eight other graduate schools of management to form the Council for Opportunity in Graduate Management Education, a concerted effort to increase the flow of black and other minority persons into significant managerial positions.

Members of the Council, in addition to the Tuck School, are graduate schools of business administration at the University of California, Carnegie-Mellon University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Stanford University.

John W. Hennessey Jr., Dean of the Tuck School, has been chosen chairman of the Council, which will be based at Columbia. A chief operating executive will be appointed shortly.

The Council will seek to increase the awareness of minority group members of the relevance of Master's programs as the professional-school link between undergraduate college experience and careers in management. It will broaden the base of financial support for minority students through a program of graduate fellowships. It will also help the participating schools sustain and strengthen their present programs for minority members..

The Council is conceived as an organization of limited life through which the participating schools will cooperate in substantially increasing the enrollment of minority students in graduate management programs over the next five years. A grant of $1 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation will sustain the Council through its first year while it seeks substantially larger funds from other sources for the support of students and other purposes. A survey of 15 graduate management schools disclosed that of the 8,000 students currently enrolled, only 180, or less than 2½ percent, were black. Other minorities are even more poorly represented.