The concluding chapter provides a summary of the results reported in the previous chapters, emphasizing the overall preferences in favor of racial/ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic diversity and the broad consensus around these preferences across groups of participants. The chapter then reviews scholarship on how diversity affects campus communities and individual students and faculty, emphasizing that effects at the community level are widely regarded to be positive whereas deeper debates surround impact at the individual level. The chapter concludes by considering current challenges to affirmative action in college admissions in the courts and from those arguing for diversity of viewpoints rather than demographics.

The demographic composition of campuses has changed dramatically in recent decades, both among students and faculty. This chapter documents those trends as well as persistent demographic inequalities. It then reviews the policies that created such inequalities as well as more recent attempts to mitigate them. It also reviews recent protests and controversies surrounding campus diversity.