Diverse: Few Indian students entering the business industry

Monday, November 26, 2012  

"As a student at Whittier College, Robert Jacobo relished learning more about Native American culture through courses in history and anthropology. But it was a business management course that helped him make up his mind about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

“The professor was also doing some consulting for an Indian tribe,” says Jacobo, a member of the Fort Mojave Indian tribe. “He took me on one of his consulting trips.” That trip, he says, showed him for the first time how business practices helped the tribe and its businesses.

Today, Jacobo, who graduated in May 2011 with a bachelor’s in business administration, works as catering manager for the Avi Casino and Resort in Nevada.

In many respects, Jacobo’s story is the exception among American Indians. But his experience in college may also be a key tool to making it less so and steering more college-bound American Indian youth onto business management education.

Even more so than other minority groups, American Indians are largely absent from corporate boardrooms, executive positions in major corporations and are rare even in many small and medium-sized businesses."

Get the Story:
Professors Work to Increase the Number of American Indians in Business (Diverse Issues in Higher Education 11/25)