Speakers
Throughout a distinguished career, Eric Abrams has gained a national reputation as a gifted administrator and outstanding public speaker who has consistently placed the needs of students first and foremost.
Born in Berkeley, Abrams spent his childhood in the Bay Area and Chicago before matriculating at Stanford, where he majored in political science and drama and served on the student senate as well as acting in and directing a number of student theatrical productions.
As a graduate student at UCLA, Abrams studied political science, as well as being elected Secretary of the Black Graduate Student Association. Shortly thereafter, he began his career in admission at the University of Southern California.
He has been successful in a number of different settings; during his tenure as Director of Admission at Pitzer College, the school had the largest applicant pool it had ever had, the mean GPA and SAT scores of the entering class were the highest in the College’s history, and the entering class was the most ethnically diverse in the history of the College. At Berkeley Law, he was fortunate to be a part of a team that met with a great deal of success; enrollment of students from traditionally underrepresented groups increased by more than 600% during his time there.
In two stints in the Stanford MBA Admission Office, Abrams led efforts that helped that institution become the most ethnically diverse of the nation’s most selective MBA programs; in addition, he served as both an academic advisor to undergraduate students as well as a Resident Fellow in an undergraduate residence.
Previously, he served as Assistant Dean for Diversity Outreach in Stanford’s Office of Undergraduate Admission. In this role, he supervised a team of professionals charged with enhancing the diversity of the Stanford undergraduate population. During his time there, over 55% of the undergraduates matriculating at Stanford self-identified as students of color, and upwards of 15% described themselves as first-generation college students.
In his current role as Director of Diversity Initiatives at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Abrams is charged with developing an overarching vision for diversity and inclusion at Haas. Building on his years of experience in admission, he is raising awareness of diversity issues across a number of dimensions internally and externally, as well as serving as the "voice of diversity" of the School. He believes that diversity is more than how one looks; it is also about how one thinks. Everyone has the potential to contribute to the intellectual diversity of the enterprise, and cultural dexterity is important for everyone in the workforce.