Dive Brief:
- Intel has pledged to commit $4.5 million over the next three years to six historically black colleges and universities in an effort to boost the low representation of African-Americans in STEM educational pathways, according to Campus Technology.
- Intel’s funding is part of the Diversity in Technology Initiative, which was started in 2015 with $300 million in support, and the company hopes to achieve full representation of women and underrepresented minorities in its workforce by the end of the decade, coming closer to match national demographics at all levels of company leadership.
- $3.9 million of the funding will go to scholarships and academic opportunities for African-American students at HBCUs who are majoring in computer science and computer or electrical engineering, and the remaining money will fund workshops hosted by the company to help build bridges between the schools and industry.
Dive Insight:
The statistics are dire for diversity in STEM education. In 2015, fewer than 1% of engineering degrees in 2015 went to African-American women, and a study from 2015 by Change the Equation indicated that the STEM workforce was no more diverse in 2015 than it was in 2001. Both K-12 and higher ed administrators should follow the lead of the six colleges and universities benefiting from Intel’s funding by forming and strengthening relationships with industry leaders to improve the outcomes for STEM women and students of color post-graduation.
Many STEM fields are experiencing a "skills gap," where the availability of open jobs is greater than the number of qualified applicants. In a recent Education Dive interview, Dr. Charles Clancy, the director of Virginia Tech’s Hume Center for National Security and Technology, revealed that there were more open positions in cyber security alone than there were computer science graduates in the past year. Opening the accessibility of STEM educational pathways to more students will make it more likely that those open positions will have enough qualified applicants to fill them.
Administrators can seek to offer apprenticeship opportunities with STEM industries, and more innovative partnerships are a possibility. In San Antonio, local tech leaders partnered with a local university and the city’s school district to build a high school specializing in teaching the skills that were lacking among applicants to jobs in those industries.