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.
In business colleges and in the business professoriate, the numbers are also dismal. Of the total number of students affiliated with the Ph.D. Project, a program that aims to steer more people of color into teaching business at the college level, only 12 American Indians were in enrolled in doctoral programs in Fall 2011. In contrast, there were 243 African-Americans and 109 Hispanic-Americans. And anecdotal evidence suggests the numbers among MBAs and at the undergraduate level are paltry as well.
If there’s a glimmer of hope in business management for American Indians, it is in the tribal colleges. Between Fall 2003 and Fall 2010, the number of business graduates from tribal colleges rose 39 percent, according to Carrie Billy, president and CEO of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. During that same period, overall graduation in business programs, including certifications, associate and bachelor’s degrees, rose 25 percent.
