Harvard University's business school has agreed to stop limiting participation in a summer program to members of particular minority groups in response to a complaint from two organizations critical of affirmative action.

David R. Lampe, a spokesman for Harvard Business School, said Tuesday that administrators there formally had altered the admissions criteria for the school's Summer Venture in Management Program last week.

Whereas the program previously was reserved for American Indian, black, and Hispanic students, it now will be open to Asian and white students from backgrounds that are underrepresented in graduate business schools. To qualify, white and Asian applicants must be from families with little business education or experience, or be the first members of their families to attend college, or be enrolled at a college "whose graduates do not typically attend a top-tier, urban university," according to the revised Web site for the program.

Mr. Lampe said that administrators at the business school had decided to change the eligibility criteria for the one-week summer program in response to a warning letter they received last March from the Center for Equal Opportunity, based in Sterling, Va., and the American Civil Rights Institute, based in Sacramento, Calif.

In the letter, the groups alleged that race-exclusive programs violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids any organization that receives federal money to discriminate "on the basis of race, color, or national origin." The groups threatened to file a complaint with the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights unless Harvard changed the criteria for program participation.

"We worked very closely with our office of general counsel," Mr. Lampe said, "and concluded that we definitely wanted to continue the program, but that we would expand our criteria."

Harvard is one of about 100 colleges that have received complaints about race-exclusive programs from the two advocacy groups in the past two years. Roger B. Clegg, general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, said that about two-thirds of the colleges contacted have responded by either changing the eligibility criteria for their programs or providing him with assurances that the criteria in question had already been changed.

Among the colleges that changed their criteria after being contacted by the center are Princeton University and the University of Virginia. The groups have filed complaints with the Office for Civil Rights against Pepperdine University, Saint Louis University, Virginia Tech, and Washington University in St. Louis. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was also named in a complaint, but it subsequently opened two summer programs in question to applicants of all races.

Mr. Lampe said Harvard Business School did not receive a letter from the groups in time to change the admissions criteria for its program last summer, but it plans to use the new criteria in weighing applicants for the one-week program this June. He said that the Summer Venture in Management Program, which is more than 20 years old, accepted 85 applicants out of a pool of 550 last year, and that he does not expect the total number of students served by the program to change significantly.

The program, for college students who have just finished their junior year, combines a week of study at Harvard Business School with a summer internship at the business or organization that has nominated and agreed to sponsor the student. The sponsor pays the student's salary and transportation costs, while Harvard Business School covers the cost of tuition, housing, and meals.