Diversity Isn’t the Point of Affirmative Action. Justice Is.

The diversity argument used to be my favorite defense of affirmative action.

It’s both simple and easily quantifiable: All the studies, I’d been told, say that using admissions preferences to build a racially diverse class not only helps minority students but also the student body as a whole. It’s appealing and, to my mind, intuitive that a class of students with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives would perform better and think more creatively than a homogeneous one.

The only trouble? If you look into “all the studies,” the evidence just isn’t there. There’s precious little proof that racial diversity improves academic performance, and the durability of that myth masks the real reason we should support affirmative action: that it’s the right thing to do.

In a seminal paper published in 2003, three researchers used survey data from over 4,000 students, faculty, and administrators at U.S. universities to demonstrate that higher levels of racial diversity were associated with a decrease in the satisfaction of faculty and administrators with the university’s quality of education and the academic readiness of students at their institutions.

One 2015 study examined group project work in an undergraduate management class to see whether age, gender, and racial diversity affected outcomes. While the gender and age composition of groups did have an impact on performance, racial diversity did not influence either individual or group outcomes.

In addition, in 2020, researchers analyzing more than 30,000 third-graders in 278 schools found that racial diversity improved grades and standardized test scores for white students, but hurt academic achievement for minority students — even after controlling for socioeconomic factors — and found a negative correlation between racial diversity and overall academic performance.

This same phenomenon has also been observed in the context of higher education.

One of the most famous series of diversity studies — by McKinsey — indicated that racial diversity among company executives could increase corporate profit. With over 1,300 citations, the original paper has become a cornerstone of the diversity argument, fueling the push to increase the number of minorities sitting on corporate boards.

But since the paper was published, multiple studies — the latest from this year — have failed to replicate McKinsey’s findings.

After Students for Fair Admissions first filed its lawsuit against Harvard’s over its affirmative action policies in 2014, the University convened a committee tasked with studying the benefits of student body diversity. But as far as I can tell, it cites only qualitative, anecdotal evidence. The most quantitative it gets are self-reported figures about the value of diversity from Harvard’s own student surveys.

Indeed, in all my research — and, trust me, I looked — I couldn’t find a single convincing study indicating that racial diversity has a statistically significant positive effect on educational outcomes.

I’m no expert in educational policy. Maybe I’m missing something glaringly obvious. But the more I research, the harder it becomes to argue with the empirics: Diversity alone does not generate educational benefits.

It’s a hard pill to swallow. The diversity argument is appealing because it’s easy. Easy to swallow, easy to argue, easy to see. It turns affirmative action into a game of numbers and checkboxes — just make sure you get a racially proportionate incoming class and you’re good.

Many of us have an intuition that there’s something hollow about that conception. The real value of affirmative action doesn’t lie in the vague promise that sitting next to someone who looks different makes us smarter or more open-minded, and it certainly doesn’t lie in its benefits for Harvard’s marketing.

Affirmative action aims to address society’s deep unfairness, the unfairness that begins with a random lottery at birth, where some face six-foot hurdles from the start while others face none at all. That’s where we should focus our arguments — not on the flimsy premise that the mere presence of diversity magically makes us all better students.

Harvard recently released some (very, condemnably) murky data indicating a decline in Black enrollment. These numbers — and even more alarming ones from schools like MIT — are an unmistakable sign that, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing affirmative action, the very real barriers facing some minority populations have only grown taller.

But obsessing over the demographic composition of Harvard’s incoming class misses the forest for the trees. Should our focus be on whether classes are 18 percent Black instead of 14? Two percent Native American instead of one? Four-tenths of a percent Estonian instead of, say, two-tenths?

It’s all a bit shallow. Race can be a decent proxy for disadvantage, but treating it as the end-all-be-all oversimplifies inequality. Race alone doesn’t consider geography or disability or access to extracurriculars or secondary school quality or, most critically, wealth. I struggle to believe a percentage-point bump in the Black population meaningfully addresses injustice if those slots are being taken by students from privileged backgrounds, regardless of race.

Racial diversity can and should be a natural outcome of addressing systemic injustices. But when we reverse that order — seeking diversity first and justice second — we only reinforce the very disparities we want to dismantle.

The path to a just society is hard, and I won’t try to parse out the particulars of the changes we should make to admissions policy. Maybe we need (much stronger) class-conscious admissions, or the end of legacy and athlete preferences, or a greater emphasis on recruiting in underrepresented communities. Maybe we need all of them and more. What matters is not the particular mix of preferences but that the telos of any such proposal is justice.

If fairness comes first, diversity will follow. In a Harvard that recognizes that — a Harvard which reflects the society we hope to build — diversity will be the proof, not the purpose, of our commitment to real and lasting justice.

Chanden A. Climaco ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Quincy House.