Professional school grads from diverse classes get higher salaries

The authors took a deceptively simple approach, examining the correlation between racial diversity in a school’s cohort and graduates’ starting salaries. In business schools, high-diversity cohorts earned starting salaries that were a standard deviation or more above the median 966 times out of 3,964 cohorts. For low-diversity cohorts, that number was just 534. For relatively low starting salaries, high-diversity cohorts showed up 531 times, while low-diversity ones appeared 933 times, largely reversing the numbers. The pattern held for law schools. High-diversity groups saw high salaries in 1,128 of 3,386 opportunities, compared with 490 for low-diversity cohorts. The same was true for both types of graduate programs when the authors measured diversity using data for the entire entering class rather than only the students being analyzed. Plenty of confounding factors could still explain the results, so Mitra, Golder, and Topchy implemented a few controls. More than a few, actually—it’s not often you see the word “thirteenth” in a paper’s list of potential caveats. Only one of the 13 added any nuance to the big picture. In that case, the trend was stronger for students entering the public sector or joining large companies. Otherwise, there was little evidence of factors that might be throwing off the results. Is there a way these two factors are linked that isn’t causal and wasn’t considered by Mitra, Golder, and Topchy? Possibly. But the effect appears robust and seems to show up no matter how the analysis is done. The big unanswered question is how this effect arises. It’s unlikely to be driven simply by employers’ preference for schools with historically diverse student bodies or by the fact that prestigious schools tend to have more diverse classes, as both are accounted for in the analysis. It’s entirely possible that people who experience more diverse perspectives present as more impressive during the hiring process, but it’s not clear how. It’s obvious that the study was motivated by the Supreme Court ruling blocking affirmative action. The authors note that the court’s decision rested on three points: that the benefits of diversity were difficult to quantify, that they weren’t directly connected to the goals of education institutions, and that there was no clear standard for determining when an affirmative action program had accomplished enough to be ended. The authors argue that they’ve cleared those objections by providing a measurable goal that serves as a valid endpoint for professional education. They also note that the measurement itself provides an indication of when diversity is sufficient that all entering classes benefit from it. On that basis, they argue that the ruling ending these programs should be reconsidered. “Courts should revisit affirmative action on the basis of our evidence and also because previous courts, business executives, military leaders and university leaders have consistently affirmed its benefits, which only the most recent Supreme Court has rejected,” they wrote. While the current Supreme Court has proven willing to revisit many past precedents, it seems unlikely it would do so for one of its own decisions. Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10425-7 (About DOIs).