Improving Diversity in Tech With Smarter Investments in Higher Education

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As the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare inequities in the United States and George Floyd's murder inspired nationwide protests for racial justice, tech companies whose revenues surged during this historic period grappled with increasing public pressure to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within their industry. While Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and other firms have announced a variety of ways to move forward, one approach to their pursuit of racial equity deserves more attention: their support of post-secondary educational institutions to increase the number of people of color working in tech.

In 2017, only 3 percent of the tech industry's philanthropic dollars went toward college-level computer science programs, while 66 percent went to programs in K-12 schools. This allocation is broken. It assumes that K-12 investments alone can quickly and efficiently move the needle, but the current landscape of computing education tells a different story: Less than half of public high schools offer any basic computer science courses. Even fewer provide the more rigorous advanced placement tracks. In California, for example, schools in low-income areas are four times less likely to offer advanced computer science courses, and rural schools are seven times less likely. Decades of focused investment in K-12 education have not yet led to a more diverse industry.

There are bright spots. A newer advanced placement course has drawn more female, Black, and Latino high school students to the field. But it and others like it still leave us with the problem of limited access to basic courses that often inspire students to study computer science in college. The result of this is a stunning failure of the tech industry to improve the diversity of the people trained in the field: Black, Latina, and Native American women, for example, collectively received only 4 percent of computer science degrees in 2017, down from 7 percent in 2003.

We are not arguing against investments in K-12 schools, but there are good reasons that doing more to support higher education institutions will improve DEI in the tech industry—though it must be done better to address flaws in the current approach and the struggles of colleges. We base our observations on our collective decades of experience working in academia and on corporate advocacy, witnessing firsthand how higher education and the private sector have the power to move the needle on diversity—or maintain the status quo through inaction.

One advantage of universities is the breadth of courses they offer, from introductory classes to more advanced instruction. Unlike many K-12 schools, universities can introduce students to computer science and develop their interest in the field. Higher education institutions can also help meet a key demand for DEI: urgency. Marginalized people armed with computer science degrees have excellent chances to immediately get jobs in the tech industry, helping to quickly move more of us closer to equity by altering their circumstances in two important ways. For one, they'll possess well-paying careers that improve their economic mobility. Secondly, through job placement at tech companies facilitated by degree attainment, they can work to improve norms, narratives, and cultures from the inside.

While we believe more tech industry investments in higher education can correct the current course, they need to be done strategically. It's not as easy as picking a university and choosing an amount. To codify diversity as a core value of the effort, three rules must be followed.

1. Go Beyond the Usual Suspects

Many companies recruit from the same institutions over and over yet wonder why they aren’t seeing a diverse workforce. This isn't a head-scratcher. If companies want to improve their results, they need to reach out to schools that are more accessible to Black and brown students, including community colleges, state universities, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs), and tribal colleges.

To understand the extent of the problem, it's worth looking at data on Black, Latina, and Native American women. They are notably underrepresented in the industry and, as women and people of color, face systemic oppression and exclusion on two fronts. Out of nearly 93,000 computing graduates in the United States in 2019, just 3,968 were Black, Latina, and Native American women. Only 225 of these women (5.7 percent of the cohort) went to the top 20 schools in the 2018 rankings of the best computer science schools from US News & World Report. Only 382 (9.6 percent of the cohort) went to the top 40 schools. Any recruiting strategy that prioritizes “top” schools over others will be ignoring around 90 percent of the pool of Black, Latina, and Native American women with computing degrees.

Tech companies serious about diversity need to reconsider where they're recruiting. If they don’t, they run the risk of discounting most of the talent pool.

2. Don't Assume You Know What Universities Need

Higher education culture is much different than the tech industry's, and donations with a lot of strings attached can frustrate more than they help. The most successful higher education investments are collaborative processes where an educational institution works with the donating tech firm to design something that helps them both.

As a start, tech companies should simply listen. They need to connect directly with computer science professors and deans. They might learn, for example, that donations of their products are useless if faculty members lack the basic essentials of time and money to learn the product and integrate it into a curriculum. What might make more sense are investments like endowed professorships. Then an institution could hire a faculty member who will have the time to make the most of product donations.

Take Dell Technologies’ sales engineering course at Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, and Spelman College in Atlanta. It started when Dell Technologies employees realized that students were not applying for sales engineering positions after college because they didn’t know what the job entailed. The Dell employees wondered how they could work directly with higher education institutions, specifically HBCUs, to prepare underestimated, untapped students for the technical careers that awaited them in the field. They created a 16-week course that was taught primarily by Dell executives who developed the curriculum in partnership with computing faculty. More than 90 percent of students said they would recommend the class to others. At Morehouse, it is among the top 10 percent of classes for student satisfaction, and Dell has hired more than 15 percent of people who took the class into full-time roles.

3. Train Students for Success

In the past 15 years, interest in computer science majors has grown massively across the United States. However, retaining women and Black, Latinx, and Native American students through degree completion has been a persistent challenge. The reasons they leave include a lack of support, the small number of visible role models, the absence of a sense of belonging, and other factors. Even those who make it into computing careers can end up feeling excluded by workplace cultures that don’t match their own backgrounds and experiences.

The solution must include investing in programs that provide soft skills that help students cope with the non-technical challenges of being underrepresented members of a challenging industry. The development of soft skills can present unexpected barriers to people trying to succeed in the workforce, especially when these behaviors are rarely formally taught but learned through exposure. Philanthropic investments can address this need in many ways: bridge programs, mentorship opportunities, internships, and industry events to name a few.

The mentoring program co-designed by Microsoft and Mt. Holyoke College provides an example. It fosters two types of interactions: near-peer mentoring, in which more senior students work with newly enrolled students, and industry-led mentoring, in which computing students team up with Microsoft employees. The goal is to cultivate an inclusive computer science culture that reduces attrition and to teach students about resilience practices such as how to have a growth mindset. The program has thus far engaged 1,062 students, 40 percent of whom identify as both women and people of color, along with nearly 200 Microsoft employees. One student said the program helped with building the "cognitive flexibility to bounce back from failure and try new approaches. ... I was debating dropping the major before going through it but now I know I do belong and can do it."

Closing the Gaps

It's undeniable that the tech industry has the money and resources to build itself into a more diverse, representative sector. While higher education is just one avenue for its DEI-advancing investments, it deserves serious and strategic attention. We need targeted grants and partnerships that reach out to a broad array of schools, understand the specific needs of universities, and train students on hard and soft skills. Without this holistic approach, the tech industry may never close the notorious race and gender gaps that often define it.

To explore the case studies in this article in more detail, please visit “How Dell & Microsoft are investing in higher education” on Reboot Representation’s Medium page.

Read more stories by Dwana Franklin-Davis & Kinnis Gosha.