Professional school grads from diverse classes get higher salaries

Study authors say courts should reconsider rulings in light of this new evidence.

See full article...

 

[intelati]

The authors want us to use logic in the rulings??

 

[LordEOD]

Anecdotal, but I had a small business boss tell me he never stopped his hiring methods based on general diversity.

Mind you the guy is far from a bleeding heart type and, in fact, I have always felt that he would be the type to learn right, but he has always made it clear that he is in business to make money.

"Racism is unprofitable." is his exact quote.

 

[Tofystedeth]

This conflicts with my anti-woke anti-DEI biases so I will pretend it doesn't exist

 

[Cumulonimbus Maximus]

I appreciate the optimism by Dr. Timmer here, but to borrow a legal phrase (and use it imperfectly), anything that derives any sort of 'legitimacy' from the current administration is fruit of the poisonous tree. This Supreme Court, specifically those appointed by this administration, are perfectly comfortable ignoring facts and reason. They're going to ignore this study and subsequent call to action by its authors. Hell, look at what's going on in HHS. Vaccines are backed by completely irrefutable evidence, and yet here we are. Ars, I love you guys. I really do, but it's high time you guys stop treating this administration as good faith actors. We simply aren't playing by the same rules.

 

[Coriolanus]

Hey, John, do you know if the authors defined starting salaries as only the salaries of those that found a job at graduation? Did it take into account graduates who might not have a job at graduation?

Also, did it take into account sectors that the graduates go into? Many elite law schools see a lot of their grads go into judicial clerkships or prosecutor's offices (and especially US attorneys). These positions are often lower paid than private sector positions, despite being more professionally prestigious.

 

[maxoakland]

I don’t believe they will care because the goal was never to help anyone, it was to hurt non-white students and bring us back to a time when it was harder for them to access higher education. That’s it.

Any justification other than that were simply fig leaves designed to obfuscate the true purpose. We need to stop giving these people the benefit of the doubt that their words mean anything

 

[SirCumference]

Am I blind or is this article missing any sort of link to the study or any mention of who the researchers are and/or what organization they work with?

Nevermind, I am, in fact, blind to the link at the bottom of the article.

 

[Coriolanus]

Am I blind or is this article missing any sort of link to the study or any mention of who the researchers are and/or what organization they work with?

The link to the study is at the bottom of the article, although be prepared to pay $100 for it, or get a subscription to Nature.

 

[poochyena]

Not a fan of how "diversity" and "racial diversity" are used interchangeable. In this study, does diversity just mean racial diversity?

 

[Hoptimist]

A plausible case can be made that a more diverse cohort in classes will ask a wider variety of questions and challenge more assumptions during the university experience. Someone who graduates with that broader range of questioning will interview differently and arguably better.

I remember a Microsoft study on product innovation that claimed better results for diverse product teams for similar reasons. In this case diversity meant age, race, gender, national origin - pretty much everything. Better questions, fewer assumptions.

 

[Coriolanus]

Not a fan of how "diversity" and "racial diversity" are used interchangeable. In this study, does diversity just mean racial diversity?

Did you read the article?

This was in the second paragraph:

A new paper highlights the uncertainty. “Learning theory argues that racial diversity promotes student learning, which should increase salaries,” its authors write. “However, well-documented racial wage discrimination indicates that higher racial diversity should decrease salaries.”

 

[RobotsNeedNotApply]

While totally unscientific, had a college professor encourage building teams with diverse people (this was in classroom working adults). The diversity often produced conflicting opinions and critical thinking/debate on the best path forward. For some reason it reminded me of creative groups like bands or Monty Python - the creative bickering creates a superior result.

I suspect those experiences result in graduates that interview better compared to those that haven’t experienced that yet.

Edited for clarity

 

[NorthGuy]

Just so you know, we have some pretty nice universities in Canada, and it can be a good path to permanent residency

 

[Tactical Finesse]

While totally unscientific, had a college professor encourage building teams with diverse teams (this was in classroom working adults). The diversity often produced conflicting opinions and critical thinking/debate on the best path forward. For some reason it reminded me of creative groups like bands or Monty Python - the creative bickering creates a superior result.

I suspect those experiences result in graduates that interview better compared to those that haven’t experienced that yet

I was at a seminar with the previous US Census Director, Rob Santos. He's a cool guy with a ton of life stories.

One of his big ones...He, as a young hispanic/latino sample statistician--was called in to assist with a federal medical grant awarding panel. Basically, an entire room of veteran M.D. level medical professionals--and he was the lowest paid guy in the room. A grant came up wanting to study low-income medical outcomes....the grant proposal wanted to offer actual standard clinical medical treatment/care to one half of the sample, and effectively none to the other. Which, while that is a way to do survey science--is intentionally denying medical care to vulnerable people.

All the M.D.s were on board with it and were about to rubber-stamp it, and Santos was the only guy in the room to raise his hand in objection. He the young stats nerd whose suit cost less than an hour of any of the other medical professionals time. Because there's other ways to get at the question--than knowingly denying medical care to people.

Which his point was that is why you want other perspectives, because even having a room full of professionals can get myopic to things that should otherwise be obvious.

 

[Wickwick]

Perhaps more diverse classes are constituted be better students? After all, if the bottom 20% of your class isn't being filled with the bottom 20% of white applicants, that portion of the student body is higher. And given the lack of representation of minorities, I would absolutely accept that minorities accepted are preferentially more qualitied as a whole than of majority candidates.

What's most surprising to me is that hiring choices actually identify and reward the students from diverse classes for whatever the reason. I have found the hiring process is rife with incompetence hiring charisma more so than competence. But then again, we're talking about JD's and MBA's where charisma could actually be core competence for the graduates.

 

[Emilio Kléber]

How did they control for the "prestige" of universities? (Article is paywalled). That seems like it could be a highly subjective judgment with the power to determine the results.

I agree with the premise (diversity good, racist orange PDF bad). However, starting salaries are not a meritocratic metric by any means. To treat starting salaries as an indicator of skill or ability is such a ridiculous assumption that I have to view the conclusions with some skepticism.

 

[DarthSlack]

How did they control for the "prestige" of universities? (Article is paywalled). That seems like it could be a highly subjective judgment with the power to determine the results.

I agree with the premise (diversity good, racist orange PDF bad). However, starting salaries are not a meritocratic metric by any means. To treat starting salaries as an indicator of skill or ability is such a ridiculous assumption that I have to view the conclusions with some skepticism.

Why would starting salaries not be meritocratic? Companies are competing for starting labor just the same way they're competing for experienced labor and someone new to the job market has just as much opportunity to negotiate a better salary.

And more to the point of the article, maybe someone coming out of a diverse background is going to be exposed to ideas like negotiation. They also probably come off as better team players, something a lot of companies look for in all levels of hiring.

 

[DJ Farkus]

The study's primary flaw is the assumption that higher salaries are a desired outcome.
For students? Obviously
But from this federal administration? Nope

 

[Shavano]

Hey, John, do you know if the authors defined starting salaries as only the salaries of those that found a job at graduation? Did it take into account graduates who might not have a job at graduation?

Also, did it take into account sectors that the graduates go into? Many elite law schools see a lot of their grads go into judicial clerkships or prosecutor's offices (and especially US attorneys). These positions are often lower paid than private sector positions, despite being more professionally prestigious.

Almost everybody has a first job after graduation.

The study's primary flaw is the assumption that higher salaries are a desired outcome.
For students? Obviously
But from this federal administration? Nope

They're certainly one of the goals of education, particularly professional education.

But if you look back at your college experience, and if not that then at the time of your life when many other people your age were in college, wasn't meeting people also a goal? And isn't meeting more kinds of people better than meeting fewer kinds?

Isn't it part of what we hope our kids will do if they go to college? Or do anything else?

 

[poltroon]

I have experienced plenty of conversations where someone with different life experience changed the outcome, bringing a perspective not already in the room. Race (and gender) is part of that, because different things happen when you are perceived in a particular way, but it's not the only aspect.

It's worth noting that this Administration and Supreme Court are against ALL forms of diversity, that they are actively attacking university admissions not just for race and gender but also country of origin, socioeconomic status, regional origin, activity and life experience differences, etc.

Meeting people who thought a little differently from me in university absolutely changed how I thought, and made me sharper and smarter and finding edge cases, appreciating how customers might react, gaming out "what could go wrong here" scenarios. I learned whole extra cohorts of understanding living in a rural area and working in a diverse company. And as the only person of my particular demographic on my team many times, I've brought some to others as well.

 

[DJ Farkus]

If anything, this federal administration will flip this study premise on it's head and assert that the study conclusively shows that graduates from "White Christian Nationalist University" are not getting a fair deal in employment market.

Always expect the worst.

 

[Coriolanus]

Almost everybody has a first job after graduation.

Where are you getting that from, because that certainly wasn't what I saw when I graduated law school.

 

[Erbium168]

Where are you getting that from, because that certainly wasn't what I saw when I graduated law school.

You are saying most law graduates are unemployable or trust fund kiddies?
Or you are applying the rules of logic in SCOTUS mode.

 

[vandon]

Well, I guess this signals one thing, and one thing only...

Time for SCrOTUS to move the goalposts.

 

[OpenThePodBayDoor]

Am I blind or is this article missing any sort of link to the study or any mention of who the researchers are and/or what organization they work with?

Nevermind, I am, in fact, blind to the link at the bottom of the article.

It's great that Ars supplies links, but I do find it weird how many journalists seem loath to mention the actual title of a paper in the main article. They say the authors, the journal, and sometimes the affiliations, but often omit the actual title. It would be like reviewing "A new Marvel movie from Disney, starring Brad Pitt and directed by Martin Scorsese" and providing a link to IMDB but never actually mentioning the name of the film. Or, "A new Stephen King book, published by Simon & Schuster" and an Amazon link but not giving the title.

I can see how some print publications might want to save space by omitting a long academic paper title, but why do so online? And maybe some mainstream publications feel that a long, complex title would be off-putting to their readers, but I wouldn't think that applies to Ars.

I assume I'm missing something obvious, but I'm really curious why this is the case.

e.g.:
https://meincmagazine.com/health/2026...shoulder-abnormalities-on-an-mri-study-finds/
https://meincmagazine.com/features/20...ll-42-percent-of-the-first-harry-potter-book/
https://meincmagazine.com/science/2025/08/study-social-media-probably-cant-be-fixed/
https://meincmagazine.com/science/2026/03/study-sycophantic-ai-can-undermine-human-judgment/
https://meincmagazine.com/science/2026/03/study-pinpoints-when-bow-and-arrow-came-to-north-america/

edited: weird formatting

 

[House of Propane]

Professional schools are essentially ranked based on starting salary, and schools at the top will have applicants and matriculants from all over the world. This result shouldn’t surprise anyone.

This seems like a diversity-washing exercise where researchers use the definition of a word (having variety of backgrounds) instead of addressing the activist usage of the word focused on promoting affirmative action for black and hispanic people in top academic programs. Google and tech companies are much more diverse than the workforce at large, but are always singled out for a lack of “diversity” in the way activists use the word.

 

[Veritas super omens]

If anything, this federal administration will flip this study premise on it's head and assert that the study conclusively shows that graduates from "White Christian Nationalist University" are not getting a fair deal in employment market.

Always expect the worst.

Expect the worst and still be disappointed that the kleptokakistonazi's manage to exceed your worst expectations.

 

[Photon_plumber]

Professional school grads from diverse classes get higher salaries​

Perhaps they understand it's a great big wide world out there, and you need to cater to everyone equally.

 

[Coriolanus]

You are saying most law graduates are unemployable or trust fund kiddies?
Or you are applying the rules of logic in SCOTUS mode.

No, that is not what I am saying. Please feel free to reread what I wrote for better reading comprehension.

 

[OpenThePodBayDoor]

Where are you getting that from, because that certainly wasn't what I saw when I graduated law school.

On a long enough timeline, I would expect that most people who graduate law school will eventually get a job, which will be their first job after graduation.
Not sure if that is what @Erbium168 meant.

 

[KrookedRooster]

"There is no evidence!"
"Here. Here's evidence."
"Wait, didn't we cut your funding? How did you get in here? Bailiff!"

 

[Tayradmax]

I don’t believe they will care because the goal was never to help anyone, it was to hurt non-white students and bring us back to a time when it was harder for them to access higher education. That’s it.

Any justification other than that were simply fig leaves designed to obfuscate the true purpose. We need to stop giving these people the benefit of the doubt that their words mean anything

That is decidedly not it. It took me a long time to realize this, but Conservatives actually don't want people to be poor or lacking, they just view government intervention as INCREASING those undesirable outcomes rather than solving them.

 

[Alethe]

There's a parallel here between human diversity and ecosystem diversity, in that varied ecosystems are far more resilient than monocultures. I'm therefore not surprised in the least that higher diversity yields better outcomes.

On a related note, I wonder how the animal equivalents of supremacists would fare... "Their beaks are shorter. Let's kill all these degenerate finches!"

 

[Cloudgazer]

Hmm, the idea that more diverse classrooms lead to be better education is perfectly reasonable, but the idea that a better education leads to better starting salaries is practically a fairy story. Education quality takes decades to increase the kind of societal prestige that actually matters for a graduates desirability in the employment market.

It's unfortunately just as plausible in this case that, in the presence of DEI policies, the most prestigious universities were most able to achieve higher diversity since they were more able to recruit the most desirable minority students. And since prestige is typically what drives earnings the causation may be essentially backwards.

 

[r r r]

It’s obvious that the study was motivated by the Supreme Court ruling blocking affirmative action.

Unpopular opinion - but any "scientific" study that is motivated by a political issue, and just happens to strongly support the investigators' own prior political position, all without identifying any realistic cause for the effect must be read with vigorous skepticism.

To take the glow of idealism off the study - imagine that an Ivermectin advocate produced a study showing that ivermectin does indeed cure cancer, but without any known pathway to cause this effect.

Or imagine if the investigation was commissioned by the Trump administration and found the opposite - diverse classes reduced salaries, but with no known cause for this effect.

In either case, we would all laugh at the study and give it zero credence. I'm not saying this study has no credibility, but until someone figures out why a diverse class would increase salaries for business and law students, holding school prestige equal and controlling for economic variables, location, etc., and replicates the finding - this needs some healthy skepticism.

 

[lwdj905]

I come to bore you with the Behavioral Econ reasoning for why diverse groups perform better.

It comes down to how social friction corrects group error. Better questioning gets you better modeling. Different risk tolerance, loss aversion including reputational harm and groups tend to get nudged towards better notions of "fairness".

Diversity overcomes groupthink and the false concensus that is typical from homogonous groupings.

The incentives of diverse groups is about removing biased thinking... better outcomes.

*I'm sure buried in the study is some line about how inteview subjects gave broader based responses because their individual backgrounds created voids that inteviewers implicitly expected. Expanded knowledge base.

 

[hpsgrad]

Hmm, the idea that more diverse classrooms lead to be better education is perfectly reasonable, but the idea that a better education leads to better starting salaries is practically a fairy story. Education quality takes decades to increase the kind of societal prestige that actually matters for a graduates desirability in the employment market.

It's unfortunately just as plausible in this case that, in the presence of DEI policies, the most prestigious universities were most able to achieve higher diversity since they were more able to recruit the most desirable minority students. And since prestige is typically what drives earnings the causation may be essentially backwards.

It sure seems like someone thought of this before publishing in Nature…

They also tested various measures of diversity, examined different diversity thresholds, and controlled for university prestige, size, and urban settings. None of those changed the trends.

 

[clewis]

Just so you know, we have some pretty nice universities in Canada, and it can be a good path to permanent residency

As a California resident, I tell all my friends to check out Canadian universities. My oldest kid went to Concordia in Montreal. My second kid went to UCLA. In state tuition to UCLA was higher than the International tuition for Concordia. And the apartment and food were cheaper too. The only downside (according to my kid) is the lack of good tacos.

If you're a US citizen, a Canadian degree gives you the ability to find a job first, then apply for a work permit after. Unfortunately, the entire time you're in school only counts as a single year towards residency requirements. But that doesn't really matter if you plan to stay permanently.