The federal government took aim on Friday at a small project that helps students seeking business school degrees, along with 45 graduate programs across the country involved with it, as part of a Trump administration promise to dismantle diversity programs.
The target is a program called the Ph.D. Project, and its stated mission is to promote the racial diversity of professors in the nation’s business schools, with the idea of “enriching education for all.”
The schools named in the investigation include Ivy League institutions like Yale and Cornell and public universities like Ohio State and Arizona State.
After the Department of Education announced its investigation, the Ph.D. project, based in Montvale, N.J., said in a statement on Friday that it had opened its process to anyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, indicating it was complying with the administration’s efforts to eliminate diversity preferences. The statement did not say when that decision was made.
Since the organization started in 1994, the Ph.D. Project has worked to increase the number of Black, Hispanic and Native American students earning doctoral degrees in business.
Since then, the total of Ph.D. degrees awarded to people in those groups grew from 294 to 1,700, according to statistics posted on the website of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, one of the project’s founding members.
Of those students, 1,303 are currently teaching in institutions of higher learning throughout the country, the association said on its website. The association could not immediately be reached for comment.
A recent federal filing by the Ph.D. Project shows its annual revenues are about $2 million. Among the business partners that help finance the organization are the KPMG Foundation and LinkedIn, according to a list on the group’s website.
The Trump administration has opposed any program that gives preference or assistance to one racial group over another. It has also indicated that it wants to expand the definition of education programs that are discriminatory, arguing in a recent letter that some programs that appear racially neutral are not.
“Students must be assessed according to merit and accomplishment, not prejudged by the color of their skin,” Linda McMahon, the education secretary, said in announcing the investigation of the 45 business school programs. “We will not yield on this commitment.”
In addition to those 45 schools, the agency said it was investigating seven other schools for violations it characterized as “race-based scholarships and race-based segregation.”
The agency provided no additional information about the focus of that investigation.
