Google opens a university in California to train African-American students to code. One of America's largest historically black colleges will be a recipient of a satellite school from one of the world's biggest tech companies. The purpose is to get more black coders into the tech industry.
America is currently undergoing diversity problems these days, thanks to its new administration. But it's not stopping a tech titan to invest on Howard University, one of the schools with the biggest African-American population, to give its students a chance to participate in an intensive coding training come summer, Business Insider reported. The initiative will be called Howard West and students will be learning inside Mountain View California's Googleplex.
About 30 juniors and seniors will be learning coding straight from Google's employees and Howard University's faculty. Their main goal is to be part of the tech industry where black coders or engineers are largely absent. Howard University's president, Dr. Wayne Frederick said it doesn't matter where these students will be employed in the future as long as it's in the tech industry.
The students will be immersed for 12 weeks learning coding and its culture. They will get course credits in their participation as well, USA Today reported. Howard West is one of Google's efforts to recruit African-American software engineers from historically black colleges and universities in America. Google acknowledges that there's a severe lack of African-American members from their payroll, especially for their technical division, where they only count one percent of African-American members in the workforce.
Bonita Stewart, a Howard University alumnus and a Google employee, said this opportunity wasn't available during her time and that there was little talk about diversity inside Google. Stewart said Google is very serious in its investment as it is an opportunity to ensure that the company is building a pipeline. It's also important to note that they are stimulating the right partnerships so that they can truly drive change.
