Racial diversity in professional schools has had an unexpected benefit: boosting starting salaries for graduates.
A new study published in the journal Natureon Wednesday found that business and law school graduates from cohorts that had just one more racial minority student earned an average of 1.5 percent to 3 percent more in starting salaries. Researchers found the increase benefited not only underrepresented students but classes overall.
“Different people bring different points of view, and that actually helps everyone,” said Debanjan Mitra, a business professor at the University of Connecticut.
The findings come as colleges and universities across the country have scaled back diversity recruitment and retention programs under pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration and in the wake of a 2023 Supreme Court decision that barred race-conscious admissions at most colleges.
The Trump administration has warned schools receiving federal moneywill face funding cuts if they engage in diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives or use “race preferences and stereotypes as a factor in admissions.” And the Justice Department has launched investigations into whether more than 70 universities, law schools and medical schools are considering diversity in their admissions process, according to a legal filing this month. The administration has sought data from colleges to ensure schools have stopped considering race in admissions, though a coalition of states is fighting those requests in court.
In the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. found the benefits of diversity were “inescapably imponderable.” But Mitra argues his study shows concrete evidence that the marketplace values students who study in a diverse class.
For a cohort of 100 students, researchers estimated that adding a student of color would boost salaries for a group of law students by almost $30,000 for the first year — or nearly $300 per student. The study found a smaller but significant gain for students seeking master’s degrees in business administration. And over the course of their careers, the benefit could add up to thousands of dollars per student (or millions of dollars for each cohort as a whole).
The study was based on data from 6,000 cohorts of graduate students at 200 law schools and 141 business schools over more than two decades.
Mitra said he and a co-author from Dartmouth College tried to account for every factor they could (including examining cohorts of students who take classes together and controlling for the reputation of the schools).
“I’ve never found such a robust finding,” Mitra said. “We kind of beat at it in every way.”
Mitra said he was surprised by the findings because decades of research had found racial minorities historically had lower salaries than their White peers with similar education levels.
The professor said he hopes the results encourage universities to continue to find legal ways to attract diverse classes.
“It’s not in anybody’s interest that classes lose racial diversity,” Mitra said.
His paper goes on to argue that “the key implication is that policies to increase or leverage racial diversity (for example, affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion programs) enhance human capital and benefit society.”
But a staffer with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said that’s misguided.
“There is very strong evidence that affirmative action actually harms students,” said Jonathan Butcher, acting director of the Center for Education Policy for Heritage.
Butcher said there’s research showing that using affirmative action in selective schools leads to admitting people who aren’t prepared for the rigor of the workload and who wind up struggling. And he said a number of studies show that DEI programs have failed to improve people’s attitudes and behavior.
The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment on the study.
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