- Educational institutions can and should make diversity central to their educational missions because student experiences with diversity can promote more active, complex thinking and prepare students as citizens in a diverse democracy.
- Structural diversity increases the probability that students will have experiences with diverse peers through their informal interactions and through formal classrooms.
- A diverse student body is a resource and a necessary condition for engagement with diverse peers that permit higher education to achieve these educational goals.
- Structural diversity provides an opportunity for actual interaction with diverse peers who have multiple points of view.
- Students cannot have experiences with diversity, especially actual interaction with diverse peers, in a racially/ethnically homogenous institution. One cannot have experience with diversity without diversity. And it’s the experience that leads to educational outcomes.
- All three databases showed effects of classroom diversity and informal interaction with diverse peers on what we called learning outcomes and democracy outcomes. Classroom diversity and interaction with diverse peers fostered learning outcomes and democracy outcomes.