T he largest tech companies may focus their recruiting efforts on students from elite private colleges, but that hasn’t stopped Gail O. Mellow from turning LaGuardia Community College into a top producer of technology talent.
Ms. Mellow, who has been president of the Queens, N.Y., campus for 16 years, has sought out unlikely partners, including financial, cosmetics, and health-care companies, to help LaGuardia students get tech jobs.
Since 2009, enrollment in the college’s technology programs has grown by 8 percent annually, on average — twice the growth rate of LaGuardia’s overall enrollment, and four times that of other community colleges in the City University of New York system.
Ms. Mellow, 63, has also helped attract start-up tech companies to NYDesigns, CUNY’s business incubator on the LaGuardia campus, and has developed a digital platform to help faculty members improve their teaching — all as part of her plan to “infuse” technology throughout the campus.
“We’re trying to create an ecosystem that surrounds our students with the ability to innovate,” she says.
LaGuardia may seem like an improbable setting for such an ecosystem to take root. More than 70 percent of the college’s students are from families with annual income under $25,000, 58 percent are women, and nearly two-thirds are black or Hispanic. That’s a far cry from the demographics at most tech companies: Apple and Google, among others, have faced criticism for staffs that are primarily white and Asian, and male.
But the college’s diversity is also a strong selling point, as Ms. Mellow and others broker deals to help students win internships, work experiences, and full-time jobs.
“Technology companies have not done a great job of bringing women and students of color into their companies,” she says. “I don’t have to look for those students. Those are our students.”
About 3,500 of LaGuardia’s approximately 50,000 students are in tech-related programs such as computer programming, cybersecurity, health information, and media and technology. One program — a five-month, four-course partnership with Weill Cornell Medical College — allows students to become medical-billing technicians at a starting salary of up to $40,000. About 25 LaGuardia students have found work at the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, in New York City, where fast-growing start-ups receive office space and mentoring. One student now has an equity stake, and a $60,000 salary, in a data-mining company supported by the incubator, Ms. Mellow says.
Other students are working or interning at NYDesigns, where 40 percent of the start-ups are focused on tech. Founded at LaGuardia in 2006, it offers companies studio space and access to mentors and a fabrication lab. Still other students have worked as technology interns at Mana Products, a makeup manufacturer across the street from the campus.
American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, a financial-services provider in Brooklyn, has mentored LaGuardia students and offered internships for three years. Initially the partnership focused only on business students, but the quality of the interns prompted Jonathan Hoseman, the company’s chief information officer, to invite LaGuardia to send students from its technology programs as well. “The LaGuardia students know multiple technologies, and they’re ready to work,” Mr. Hoseman says. “This is a relationship that we would like to keep going.”
A LaGuardia pamphlet on the local tech sector notes that nearly three out of every four tech jobs in New York City are in nontech industries. “Even things like big banks are now tech companies in drag,” Ms. Mellow says. “If you’re going to make sure that low-income students and students of color have opportunities, you have to partner not only with the tech industry but also with the technology aspects of nontechnical industries.”
Ms. Mellow knows personally how a community college can aid economic mobility. She earned an associate degree from Jamestown Community College, in southwestern New York State, while raising a young child and working full time.
“If there hadn’t been a community college in my town,” she once told a reporter, “I might be working for Walmart today.”
She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree at the State University of New York at Albany and a Ph.D. in social psychology at George Washington University. She was chosen to lead LaGuardia in 2000, after three years as president of Gloucester County College, in New Jersey (now Rowan College at Gloucester County).
LaGuardia makes it easy for students to jump into technology education, Ms. Mellow says. A new program, called “open code,” allows them to master web-programming languages, such as HTML, JavaScript, and Ruby, in a noncredit setting. LaGuardia has also joined with #YesWeCode, a national effort to train 100,000 low-income youths to become computer programmers, to develop best practices for coding instruction at the community-college level.
Gobinda Senchury, who moved to Brooklyn from Nepal just over two years ago, is a computer-science major in his second year at LaGuardia. At age 14, he hacked the security measures on his brother’s computer so he could play computer games.
Last summer a LaGuardia professor pointed Mr. Senchury to YouTube sites that would teach him how to develop mobile apps. The professor later tapped him to conduct research through LaGuardia’s Bridges to the Baccalaureate program, which is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Mr. Senchury is helping to secure health data shared on mobile devices. He has also developed a mobile app to help students learn the C++ programming language, and at a recent hackathon at CUNY’s nearby Lehman College, his five-person team took second place and earned $1,000.
“If a student is willing to put in some effort, LaGuardia pushes really hard to prepare them for the industry,” Mr. Senchury says.
LaGuardia is also pushing hard to help its faculty members improve instruction through technology. The college has received $3.4 million in grants to develop software that allows faculty members to evaluate their own teaching and engage with their peers. Ms. Mellow discusses the approach in a book that she co-wrote last year, Taking College Teaching Seriously: Pedagogy Matters!
“A lot of education technology is just throwing stuff at the classroom,” she says. “This is using technology so that you can create data on your own teaching. You have to look at your own practices in order to get better.”
Ms. Mellow hasn’t given up on the large tech companies that generally overlook colleges like hers. As the tech sector expands, she argues, such companies will have to hire more students from community colleges. “It’s not just an issue of social justice but also an issue of practicality,” she says.
Her next step is to bolster LaGuardia’s technology faculty by persuading established tech companies to share an employee with the college — and underwrite the cost. The employee would divide his or her time between the sponsoring company and teaching at LaGuardia.
“It’s not currently happening, but it’s on my dream list,” Ms. Mellow says.
Given LaGuardia’s recent track record, that dream may just come true.
Correction (4/13/2016, 4:56 p.m.): This article originally referred in error to graduate students at LaGuardia Community College. The college has no graduate students, and the article has been updated to reflect this correction.
