A new Nature study reports that increased racial diversity in MBA and law school cohorts is associated with higher starting salaries at graduation, with effects extending to entire classes—not only underrepresented students. Authored by researchers including Debanjan Mitra (University of Connecticut School of Business) and Peter Golder (Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business), the paper analyzes thousands of cohorts tracked over multiple decades. The researchers report a marginal association of roughly $13,000 in cumulative first-year salary gains for MBA cohorts and about $30,000 for law cohorts when adding a single underrepresented minority student to a cohort of 100. Because starting salary differences compound over careers, the study estimates sizable cumulative lifetime earnings effects for full cohorts. The paper’s scale—2,964 MBA cohorts across 141 business schools and 3,386 law cohorts across 200 law schools—positions the findings as one of the more precise, cohort-based attempts to quantify labor-market links between classroom composition and early-career pay.