Since Robert Dolan, dean of the Ross School of Business, first stepped into his spacious East University Avenue office six years ago, he's had a tough job: staying at the front of a cutthroat pack of American business schools.

Now that Michigan voters have banned affirmative action, his job might be getting harder. Diversity, Dolan has frequently said, is vital to the Business School's educational philosophy.

If his school's ability to foster that diversity erodes, so might recruiters' tastes for its graduates.

SETTING ROSS APART

A self-described "marketing guy," Dolan knows the importance of standing out.

His work, he said, is a constant search for what he calls the "point of differentiation" - the key set of qualities and skills that will make the school's graduates priceless to employers.

That's why Dolan said he has focused on experiential learning, which he distinguished from the lecture and discussion-based models used by most schools.

While students will find traces of traditional approaches at Ross, he said, most classes compel students to connect with their environment and peers directly.

"Sometimes we're taking our students and exporting them to the real world," he said. "And sometimes we're taking the real world and creating it here."

He pointed to the school's Multidisciplinary Action Programs. Every year, MBA students tackle about 85 seven-week projects. Each focuses on a real-world issue.

"It could be figuring out what the Landmine Survivors Network ought to do in Bosnia," he said. "How 3M can open up channels of distribution in China. Whatever."

Instructors hand-select the teams, ensuring diversity of "national origin, race, gender and so forth," Dolan said.

To succeed, team members must hurdle any cultural boundaries that arise.

Much of the program's value comes from the variance among student backgrounds and viewpoints, Dolan said. Team-based environments force students to actively engage a diverse set of people - something they might not do outside of class.

"It seems to be working for us," he said, citing Ross's perennial position at the crest of rankings published by U.S. News and World Report, Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal.

Most of these rankings lean heavily on recruiter preferences, Dolan said. Because companies usually cater to diverse sets of customers, they value applicants sensitive to ethnic, racial and cultural differences.

Ross's hands-on approach to diversity gives graduates an edge, he said: "There is no one that has done it on the level we do."

Although Proposal 2 won't take effect until next month, some current students say the school isn't diverse enough as is.

Sumanth Rao, a student in the Business School's evening MBA program, said he has been disappointed with his classes' lack of minorities and women.

Rao works full-time for ArvinMeritor, an automotive supplier that encourages its employees to learn about diversity firsthand. As a result, he said, he tries to work with students as different from himself as possible.

But he often comes up short. The international student body has "too many Indians and Chinese," said Rao, who is Indian.

Business School junior Ruben Soto, a Latino, said that he knows "pretty much all the other third-year Latinos" - which he estimated numbered only three or four in a class of 366.

Hector Orejuela, a Business School junior from Puerto Rico, said he thought there was a slightly higher percentage of Latinos - about 5 percent - but said that the proportion was still too small. He said blacks seem particularly underrepresented.

The Business School's most recent class profile lists Soto and Orejuela's class as 29 percent nonwhite but does not differentiate by individual race or ethnicity. Current MBA classes are listed as being between 23 and 26 percent minorities.

Despite these concerns, Dolan's approach seems to be working. In September, the Business School beat out historically black Howard University to take the first spot in the Wall Street Journal's "Top Schools for Recruiting Minorities" category.

THE CHILLING EFFECT

Whether Proposal 2 will change this is still a matter of speculation. Recruiters have been fairly silent on the issue, and new rankings are months away.

For now, Dolan is optimistic.

The Business School's minority recruitment relies mostly on outreach programs, he said.

One such program is UpClose, an invitation-only weekend-long whirl of meetings, lectures and tours focused on wooing minority students.

Dolan often uses business terminology to illustrate his points, and he called these programs pipeline builders - efforts to "generate demand for our product."

Because these programs don't make exclusions on gender or race, he said, they should withstand the burst of legal scrutiny that Proposal 2 is expected to spark.