Maximizing Diversity in the Engineering Global Leadership Cultural Families

We present a new formulation for assigning students to groups to maximize the diversity within each group. We compare its solution to that of the well-known linearized maximally diverse grouping problem. The new formulation minimizes similar student attributes within a group by penalizing the deviations from the target number of students with each attribute within each group. We apply the model to the task of assigning University of Michigan Engineering Global Leadership (EGL) Honors Program students to cultural families. The EGL program implemented the results of the model with minimal changes.