When Amazon announced its decision to locate a second headquarters in Northern Virginia, college presidents throughout the Washington region thrilled to the prospect of a partnership to fund new technology programs and open new career pathways for thousands of local college students. For some of us, however, our delight turned to dismay when we learned of exclusive meetings that Amazon had convened with only some area institutions, leaving many of us on the margins, thus denying opportunities to our students.
Higher education’s role in promoting social equity is a hot topic for research and commentary, with much of the critique focused on admissions practices at elite colleges. But widening access to a few colleges is hardly enough to move the needle higher on the social-equity scale, especially if companies that have some of the most lucrative jobs in the nation team up with only select institutions for programs, grants, and employment opportunities.
Technology companies and other top employers are a big part of the social-equity challenge. Too often, employers create closed loops of opportunity for select elite colleges and their graduates while foreclosing opportunities for other, more diverse students attending more broadly accessible colleges.
When I learned that my institution, Trinity Washington University, was among the institutions initially excluded from Amazon’s preferred academic group, I immediately set about finding ways to secure a seat at that important table — not for me, since I have more than enough meetings to attend, but for my students. Trinity serves a majority of low-income women who are African American and Latina, students who are largely left out of the career pipelines into major technology companies where the work force is overwhelmingly white and male.
The great scandal of American higher education today is that African American college graduates have grown only more impoverished.
The diversity challenge in the technology industry is well known. As Wired magazine reported, the 2019 “Diversity Report” of the major technology companies showed little change from 2014, and for Facebook, Google, and Microsoft the proportion of black employees is 1 to 3 percent; Apple has a whopping 6 percent; the proportion of Hispanic personnel is also in single digits at those companies. According to data on its website, Amazon is slightly better, with a proportion of black and Hispanic managers at 7.2 percent and 7.3 percent, respectively.
The companies’ recruiting practices exacerbate the problem. The top companies recruit at a small group of elite universities where the students are likely to be more privileged and less diverse. Black-student enrollment at the most elite tech-feeder universities is in the low single digits. Those students who are invited to the tech table have a great deal of choice for their career pathways, somewhat perversely giving them the privilege of rejecting invitations for employment in the kind of well-paying jobs that students who are excluded might crave.
A recent New York Times article on “techlash” at top universities noted, “Many students still see employment in tech as a ticket to prosperity, but for job seekers who can afford to be choosy, there is a growing sentiment that Silicon Valley’s most lucrative positions aren’t worth the ethical quandaries.”
As I read about students at Stanford and Berkeley rejecting Apple and Google, I thought about my students and others among the hundreds of minority-serving institutions that educate millions of low-income students of color. Our students who are otherwise qualified for the jobs should have the same opportunities as Stanford students to accept — or reject — work in the technology industry. If top companies recruit only at top universities, we will never make real progress in advancing social equity for those who remain marginalized because of the racism and classism that still stratifies American society.
Exclusive corporate recruiting is an old and discriminatory tradition from the days when employers considered the prestige of the institution to be an automatic marker for the excellence of its graduates; hence, generations of Harvard Law graduates replicated themselves at certain white-shoe law firms. But exclusive employer-recruiting practices can be as pernicious as legacy admissions when it comes to choking off pathways to social equity for students who are not so lucky as to have the “old school ties” that benefit graduates of elite institutions.
A 2019 study by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce in cooperation with JPMorgan Chase & Company found, not surprisingly, that white workers are more likely to have what the study defined as “good jobs” than are black and Latino workers at every level of education, and the gap is growing. Women, too, still suffer pervasive wage and promotion discrimination in the work force, and black women, in particular, are falling further behind on the social-equity scale even as they rack up the most collegiate debt, according to a 2019 study by the American Association of University Women.
The great scandal of American higher education today is that African American college graduates have grown only more impoverished due to high debt burdens that are not offset by economic advancement. Exclusionary practices that concentrate corporate recruiters on only some elite colleges contribute to that problem.
A different Georgetown study illustrates the effect of employment discrimination on college graduates. According to data from the 2019 study, “Ranking ROI of 4,500 Colleges and Universities,” cohorts of women’s colleges and minority-serving institutions fare less well than do cohorts from mainstream institutions on long-term earnings, a result that is hardly surprising given the pervasive and chronic gender and race discrimination in employment.
Navigating the politics of exclusion in employment opportunities is complicated when academic and social biases present themselves as qualifications for employment. Trinity does not have a computer-science program, so when we met with representatives of an organization that works with major technology companies in the Washington region, they were initially dismissive, saying that, based solely on a review of our website, we did not have the programs they wanted.
But the technology industry has many more career pathways beyond computer science, with most grounded in a strong liberal-arts platform. As we queried the tech reps on the knowledge, skills, and competencies they expected, we identified many of the same outcomes in our curriculum but with different labels.
Rather than accepting exclusion as a consequence of our mission in serving low-income women of color, we advocated for their inclusion. We received support to revise the curriculum to make it more explicitly tied to the outcomes required to ensure that our students can compete for the tens of thousands of good jobs in the growing tech industry in the Washington region. Learning to speak about “cloudification” is a small price to pay to be sure my students have seats at the table.
College presidents must do more to confront employer biases that diminish the lifetime economic potential of our graduates. We need to educate our corporate peers among CEOs and top executives — many of whom are our graduates — about the values at stake in promoting social equity. Social equity does not just happen; to fulfill higher education’s promise of greater social equity, we must insist on a more equitable distribution of corporate engagement and employment opportunities for all students, not just the fortunate few.
