Response from Director of IU Kelley IBW to Fake Diversity Allegations

Last week, a WallStreetOasis user (and apparent student at the Kelley School of Business) anonymously posted allegations that students within Kelley’s Investment Banking Workshop misrepresented their ethnicities to investment bank employers to qualify for early diversity recruiting processes. The poster went on to say that the directors of the IBW encourage and enable such behavior. The original poster’s apparent evidence for the allegations is that the students do not look like the ethnicity they have claimed when recruiting for banks. Since the original post, other media outlets have picked up on the story.

As a director of the IBW, I take such allegations seriously. However, based on my knowledge about the accused students and my investigation into the allegations, none misrepresented themselves to banks. As a director of the workshop, I advise students to apply only to programs for which they qualify, and if in doubt, to contact the human resource departments at the banks. If a student in the IBW were caught misrepresenting themself to a bank, they would promptly be expelled from the Workshop. There is zero tolerance for the type of dishonesty and misconduct alleged.  I stand firmly in support of our students, and they remain in good standing in the IBW. The students mentioned online and I have been in dialogue with the firms where they work, and the firms have been incredibly supportive of the students, finding no evidence of wrongdoing.