Keywords: diversity, race, racial, stereotypes, whites, Blacks, Asians, university, campus diversity, recruitment

Graduates from universities with diverse student bodies will be better equipped to build friendships across racial and ethnic lines because they are familiar with people different from themselves, a new study says. For companies, that is important because, as the U.S. population increases its number of non-whites in corporate America, companies will be forced to hire more people who are non-white. Getting along with your coworkers now includes cross-cultural competence and will even more in the future.

As it stands, the study in Social Science Quarterly found non-whites make friendships across racial and ethnic lines at a greater rate than whites do, and that campus racial and ethnic diversity is important in predicting friendship heterogeneity. The University of Connecticut's Mary J. Fischer used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen to examine how college characteristics, social distance felt toward other groups and pre-college friendship diversity affects the formation of interracial friendships in the first year of college. Results showed the more students were exposed to people who were different racially and ethnically, the more cross-group friendships there were for all students. As a school's diversity increases, so does the number of cross-group friendships. This is true for whites as well, who had nearly as diverse a friendship network as their non-white fellow students on the most diverse campuses.

Click here to read the full story in Science Daily.