Among the top management education institutions, "Kellogg has one of the larger contingents of minority students," says Marvin Washington, who earned his Ph.D. from Kellogg in June and is now a visiting professor of organization behavior at Texas Tech University. "In the Organization Behavior Department, it was not surprising to have minorities as your cohorts." Currently, there are eight underrepresented minorities enrolled in the school’s Ph.D. programs.

Kellogg’s success in attracting top minority doctoral students is the result of an aggressive targeted recruiting effort.

"We have made a commitment to actively seek out candidates who are going to do well here and be alumni of whom Kellogg is really proud," says Jain, the faculty director for Kellogg’s Ph.D. programs.

Before enrolling minority candidates, Kellogg first must attract them to the school and the Ph.D. process, and this is where the faculty and administration are concentrating many of their efforts.

"The greatest challenge associated with increasing minority Ph.D. enrollment is expanding the initial minority applicant pool," says Susan Jackman, coordinator of Ph.D. programs at Kellogg. "Our goal is to plant the seed of pursuing a Ph.D. in the minds of prospective minority applicants and give these people the opportunity to see if pursuing a Ph.D. is right for them."

To do this, two years ago Kellogg began hosting annual panel discussions that allow prospective minority applicants, many of them current Kellogg MM and University of Chicago MBA students, to network with Kellogg faculty and current minority Ph.D. students. During these informal meetings, students can ask questions about Kellogg’s Ph.D. programs, find out about funding and scholarship opportunities, and learn about the pros and cons of life as a business school professor from the people who have chosen this career.

"Many minorities don’t have friends or relatives who are professors, so they walk in with tons of questions," Washington says. "I have taken a real interest in participating in the panels and helping to answer those questions for people because it only helps in making their decision that much easier."

The reason Washington left his high-paying job at Procter & Gamble to become a business school professor was simple: He wanted to show all students that they can do whatever they want–regardless of their racial or ethnic background, he says. "There are so few minority professors out there that it becomes easy to say, ‘Well, minorities must not do well in that,’ as opposed to realizing all of the structural barriers that have been in place."

As part of its Ph.D. recruitment efforts, Kellogg also hired Northwestern doctoral student Regina Deil to build a robust database of minority students and professionals who Kellogg targets to receive information about the school’s Ph.D. offerings. The database includes members of myriad professional groups such as the National Black MBA Association and the Mexican American Engineers Society as well as minorities who have taken the GMAT, GRE or other graduate school admission tests. The database also includes faculty and administrators at other universities who interact with talented minority students.

Kellogg’s goal is to tap into pools of skills and talent that for one reason or another might not have been on the school’s radar screen. The work that is happening now is an extension of more than a decade of efforts by Jain, Finance Professor Kathleen Hagerty, Management & Strategy Professor Marcus Alexis and Associate Dean Edmund Wilson.

Kellogg also works closely with the Ph.D. Project to recruit prospective minority candidates. Each year the school pays $1,000 to send student and administrative representatives to the Ph.D. Project’s November conference, where they work to sell candidates on the strengths of Kellogg's Ph.D. programs. Including Rosette, Kellogg has admitted six Ph.D. Project participants.

"Kellogg found its way into our history from the very beginning," Milano says. "One of the things that gave us so much comfort in the beginning was that Northwestern, Stanford and Harvard were dedicated to this from day one. Kellogg’s fingerprints are on this significantly."