An objective reading of the research, the most broad and extensive series of empirical analyses ever conducted on college students in relation to this issue, will answer many questions that have lingered during our nation's debate over the merits of diversity in higher education. Primary among those is whether the need to ensure diversity constitutes a compelling government interest and whether admission policies that help ensure diversity are thus essential. Students come to universities at a critical stage of their development-a time during which they define themselves in relation to others and experiment with different social roles before making permanent commitments to occupations, social groups, and intimate personal relationships. In addition, for many students college is the first sustained exposure to an environment other than their home communities. Higher education is especially influential when its social milieu is different from the environment from which the students come and when it is diverse and complex enough to encourage intellectual experimentation.
Students learn more and think in deeper, more complex ways in a diverse educational environment.
Extensive research in social psychology demonstrates that active engagement in learning cannot be taken for granted. For an educational institution, the challenge obviously is to find ways to engage the deeper, less automatic mode of thinking. Complex thinking occurs when people encounter a novel situation for which, by definition, they have no script, or when the environment demands more than their current scripts provide. Racial diversity in a college or university student body provides the very features that research has determined are central to producing the conscious mode of thought educators demand from their students. This is particularly true at the University of Michigan because most of the University's students come to Ann Arbor from segregated backgrounds.