The former improves average post-graduation median salary, so it's good for the reputation. But I doubt the latter contributes in the same way.
1. With high-income whites some dumb blokes may sneak in due to privilege and winging it based on family connections, etc. This might be happening at the expense of spunky smart low income whites or blacks who worked harder and were smarter to overcome their disadvantage to get to a point where they’re in the pool of those being considered for admission into Stanford.
2. Diversity hires bring fresh perspectives and help break group-think. In my experience, all-white, all-Indian, all-Asian, etc. teams were always inferior in terms of the experience of working there to diverse teams.
I am fairly certain that a poor white guy would have a very different perspective from one who grew up in a life of privilege but that socioeconomic diversity doesn’t look as good I guess.
I feel like I'm missing some kind of obvious universal common-sense knowledge in having to ask this, but by what mechanism could this possibly come about?
Not that quick. I'm familiar with a certain department in a certain party school in the Midwest. The faculty in that department is entirely white, with the exception of one Indian, who was hired long ago. There is no reason to believe that the applicant pool contains mostly white people or that the top applicant is invariable white - the job market in the Sciences has been LOUSY the last ten years!
But the department is all-white. You'd think it tells something about the atmosphere in that institution, and indeed it's frankly xenophobic.
> The former improves average post-graduation median salary,
> so it's good for the reputation. But I doubt the latter
> contributes in the same way.
In particular, the data time and again show that in the US wage gaps persist for women and minorities. [0] [1]
So if "diversity candidates" who matriculate to Stanford have above average median salaries post-graduation, these scholarships are "good for the reputation" in the same way.
[0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/01/racial-gender-wage-gaps-persist-in-u-s-despite-some-progress/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_wage_gap_in_the_United_States