Does Law School Diversity Make You Rich?

A new study claims that graduates of more diverse law schools get paid slightly more.

From the Washington Post:

Law and MBA graduates earn more if classes are racially diverse, study shows

Graduates from classes that had just one more racial minority student earned higher starting salaries, according to research in the journal Nature.

April 30, 2026 at 10:22 a.m.

By Todd Wallack

Racial diversity in professional schools has had an unexpected benefit: boosting starting salaries for graduates.

This was more or less the theory behind legalizing affirmative action up through 2023: the controlling decision in the Bakke decision of 1978 asserted without evidence that classroom discussion diversity would benefit students of all colors. The Bakke decision hypothesized:

“The atmosphere of ‘speculation, experiment and creation’—so essential to the quality of higher education—is widely believed to be promoted by a diverse student body”

Uh, sure … After all, who can forget the vastly intellectually productive intellectual ferment of the recent Cancel Culture era on campus?

I could imagine examples of that being true, such as in MBA marketing classes where discussions of different market segments’ prejudices could be useful: e.g., “We Hispanic men don’t like to be told what to do by black women, so don’t use them in your TV commercials. We especially hate Kamala Harris types, so don’t nominate her for President for God’s sake!”

Maybe somebody would have had the courage to say that in 1978, but a half century later?

Overall, I’ve seen very, very little research into actual pros and cons of diversity other than just McKinsey-quality hand-waving about how diversity must somehow bring valuable new perspectives, like astronaut Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) recently claiming that to have an all white male crew on the Space Shuttle would have been a disaster.

Kelly did have an all white male crew and no disaster ensued.

The vast amount of learning and decision-making involves technical questions that have little to do with racial diversity. For instance, it’s hard to imagine anything involving space travel at present in which racial diversity would be an obvious technical help (other than PR).

And, of course, what there seems to be much more evidence for is that affirmative action, by exacerbating the IQ racial caste system on campus, worsens educational race relations and makes discussions touchier and less informative.

For instance, I know a lot about the social science on diversity. But I almost never get invited to speak at colleges, and when I do it becomes an international controversy in The Guardian.

A new study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday found that business and law school students from diverse classes generally earned higher starting pay when they graduated. 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 money will 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.

That’s a pretty small amount. Big Law starting salaries these days are $200,000+, while lesser legal starting positions average in the upper 5 figures.

The study found a smaller but significant gain for students seeking master’s degrees in business administration.

The MBA premium was $125.00.

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).

Or maybe not.

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.

Lots of data to arrive at a statistically significant result.

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.

One issue is that this study counts all law school …

Paywall here.