July 1999 Issue

The PhD Project

Encouraging Minority Students and Faculty in Business Schools

By Bernard J. Milano, CPA

Minorities constitute a very low percentage of CPAs in the United States. One reason for this is the low number of minority students studying business in traditionally majority universities. Unfortunately, it is not unusual to visit an accounting class, club, or Beta Alpha Psi meeting and find an absence of minorities.

The PhD Project is a comprehensive, long-range effort to substantially increase minority faculty and, ultimately, student representation in the nation's business schools. The PhD Project aims to advance this goal by acting as a catalyst for more minorities to pursue doctorates in business and become professors. Research shows the presence of minority professors as mentors and role models is a determining factor in leading more minority undergraduates to enroll in business schools.

Funded by corporate and academic sponsors for $6 million since its inception, the PhD Project is a results-driven program to diversify business school faculties. The program has played a part in producing the following statistic: While there are only 388 minority business school faculty members with doctorates in the United States, there are currently 375 minority students enrolled in a doctoral program, many of whom were identified through the PhD Project. There are only 137 minority accounting professors and 75 minority accounting doctoral students. Historically, minorities were underrepresented in U.S. business school faculties--now their ranks are poised to double.

The PhD Project, while encompassing all of management education, links to and benefits accounting education directly. The program's oldest, most established component, the Minority Accounting Doctoral Students Association, is in its own right a successful innovation. This organization, now five years old, is a peer association providing every minority accounting doctoral student in the United States with advanced skills, peer support, mentoring, and networking to help ensure a high doctoral program completion rate. This component alone has had a significant and positive impact on increasing the diversity of accounting faculty.

The Minority Accounting Doctoral Students Association, created in 1994, was the first of five associations (one for each discipline of management education) created to provide networking opportunities for minorities who are often the only ones of their ethnic or racial background in their particular programs. A major activity of the accounting association is an annual conference, held in conjunction with the annual conference of the American Accounting Association (AAA).

The doctoral students association meeting, its link with the AAA meeting, and the organization's other activities help doctoral students interact, share knowledge with, and get support from each other and from faculty. At their meeting, they hear presentations from and meet with editors of major academic journals and other scholars. Peers present research that the group then analyzes and critiques. Many minority students in the association are sharing these tools, research materials, and advanced skills with not only other minority students but with all doctoral students in their programs, contributing further to the PhD Project's positive impact on accounting education.

These and other activities have been successful in helping combat the high attrition rate inherent among all business doctoral students. To date, the dropout rate for students in the Minority Accounting Doctoral Students Association is 6 percent or lower, far below the prevailing dropout rate for the entire population of accounting doctoral students.

The PhD Project minority professors mentor and are role models in the classroom. Nearly all of the doctoral students serve as teaching assistants and interact with undergraduates. This is particularly significant because of the concentrated involvement of doctoral teaching assistants with first- and second-year undergraduates. Based on reports from a small group representing 16 percent of the accounting doctoral students, the sample group alone has taught a total of 55 classes, reaching 4,500 students to date. The minority doctoral students are interacting with undergraduates at precisely the critical period in which the undergraduates are forming opinions and making decisions about majors and career choices. This allows for maximum opportunity to influence students to pursue a business course of study--a prime long-term objective of the PhD Project.

"I feel I have had a very positive impact on my students," said Peter M. Theuri, CPA, assistant professor at Mississippi State University. "I know minority students who have switched majors (to accounting) because of my interaction with them. I have also noticed that the minority students who enrolled in my class had some interaction with other minority students who previously took my class. I think this shows, in a small way, what impact the presence of a minority instructor has on students."

The PhD Project was created by the KPMG Foundation with lead cosponsors the Graduate Management Admission Council, AACSB-International Association for Management Education, and Citibank. Other sponsors include Chrysler Corporation, Ford Motor Company Fund, James S. Kemper Foundation, Fannie Mae Foundation, Institute of Management Accountants, Texaco, Abbott Laboratories, AICPA, Merrill Lynch & Co. Foundation, Inc., Mobil Corporation, and State Street Corporation. Eighty-nine of the nation's most prestigious business schools, which collectively award more than 90 percent of all business school doctorates, have participated. *

Bernard J. Milano is partner in charge of university relations, executive director, and trustee of the KPMG Foundation.