A Nature study is putting new numbers on the economic association between racial diversity in professional school cohorts and graduate pay. Researchers led by Debanjan Mitra (University of Connecticut), Peter Golder (Dartmouth’s Tuck School), and Mariya Topchy (UConn alum) analyzed 2,964 MBA cohorts across 141 business schools and 3,386 law school cohorts across 200 law schools over multiple decades. After controlling for student quality and school differences, the authors report that adding one underrepresented minority student to a cohort of 100 correlates with about $13,000 more in cumulative first-year median starting salaries for MBA classes and roughly $30,000 for law school cohorts. The study extends the estimate to lifetime earnings across the cohort, attributing compounding benefits to the observed diversity signal. For higher education leaders, the findings intensify pressure to evaluate diversity strategies not only as moral and civic commitments, but also as measurable inputs into post-graduation labor market outcomes.