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The program has captured the attention of industry giants, including Wal-Mart, which was a sponsor of The PhD Project's annual invitation-only conference last month in Chicago. DiversityInc was at the conference, which gathered 390 B-schools reps and students as well as professionals from across discipline and industry lines.  

(See also: Why Are So Few CEOs People of Color and Women and Which Companies Are Tops for Black, Latino, Native American Interns?)

"With Wal-Mart's sponsorship of The PhD Project, we really understand the need for diverse talent," says Jody Hestand, a diversity recruiter with Wal-Mart. "While we are not actively hiring PhDs on a daily basis, we really recognize the value of this project in developing diverse faculty within business schools to attract more diverse candidates to the colleges of business and ultimately to the business force." Wal-Mart is No. 41 on The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity^® list.

Established in 1994, The PhD Project seeks to increase the number of executives who are black, Latino and Native American by increasing the number of business professors from those groups. The idea is that talented students need mentors and guides who understand them and their backgrounds.

"The PhD Project was really an effort that grew out of frustration," says Bernie Milano, president of The PhD Project and the KPMG Foundation, who in 1994 was a recruiter for accounting firm KPMG. "We were trying to make sure at KPMG that we had a diverse work force, but there was a shortage of blacks, Latinos and Native Americans."

Forecasting that an increase in the number of faculty members who were people of color would ultimately create a more racially/ethnically diverse work force, Milano led the effort to create a program that specifically targeted students of color.

"We wanted to have a deeper pool of minority students to recruit for corporate America, and we've done just that," says Milano. The organization has tripled the number of people of color teaching in business school and will graduate another 411 over the next two years.

Providing a support network for blacks, Latinos and Native Americans pursuing business doctoral programs, The PhD Project puts them in front of the classroom at some of the nation's top B-schools, ranging from Harvard Business School to the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. It has slashed the average dropout rate for doctoral students from these groups from 35 percent to 7 percent.

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