How a ‘Layer’ Inside an Academic Department Can Diversify a Field

Following is a transcript of the conversation.

“There’s this incredible wealth of missed talent out there. There’s talent that’s just about ready, but they’re invisible. There’s talent that — they’re not quite ready — but they don’t need that much time. They need the right support in order to get them ready.” —Michael Ellison

Goldie Blumenstyk: Welcome to Innovation That Matters, a Chronicle of Higher Education podcast sponsored by HP. In this special series, we’ll be sharing the stories of change makers working to improve equity in higher education. Hello, I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, and that voice you just heard is Michael Ellison, co-founder and CEO of CodePath. Michael, thanks for joining us today.

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Michael Ellison: I’m excited to be here.

Blumenstyk: So Michael, I’ve done a few of these podcasts before, and I generally start by asking my guest, what is their organization? But with you, I feel like I want to ask not what is CodePath, but at first, why? Why is CodePath? Why do you exist?

Ellison: So why don’t I answer that question by just sharing very quick background, because a lot of why CodePath exists is rooted in my own story, my own journey. I grew up initially low-income, rural Maine, single-mother household. And at points in time, we were homeless growing up. I fortunately was able to get to college. And when I got into college, I was interested in computer science. I enrolled and, unfortunately, dropped out my first semester.

Like thousands of students from underrepresented, low-income backgrounds across the country, I felt like I didn’t belong. And honestly, I felt like I wasn’t smart enough to major in computer science. I ended up going on to found three nonprofits and three tech startups, one that was recently acquired for over $3 billion. So I clearly had potential, but I didn’t feel like I belonged in tech. And the reason why CodePath exists is to make sure that our nation’s pathways to success don’t depend on luck.

Blumenstyk: And so what does CodePath do?

Ellison: So CodePath is focused on transforming college computer-science education in a way that will, at scale, help underrepresented minorities, especially from low-income, disadvantaged backgrounds, to become elite, high-performing software engineers.

Blumenstyk: You know, I talk to a lot of employers, and I often hear a lot from just industry people in general. A lot of people say, People coming out of college aren’t really prepared for the workplace. They don’t have the right skills. What’s really so distinctive about the computer-science field, where the challenges are especially difficult for students entering?

Ellison: Well, it’s like technology is constantly changing, constantly evolving. So when it comes to becoming a software engineer, you can think of lots of different layers, from quality assurance or help-desk IT, all the way up to Android as a specialization. And the highest in-demand technical skills are actually these specializations that aren’t taught across a lot of different schools. So it’s layers upon layers.

And to give you an example, a lot of employers talk about, “We need soft skills.” Well, soft skills, like having very effective communication, it’s expected you’re going to be able to read and write and communicate effectively, on top of being able to program, in order to be able to play a more critical role inside your company. So when we’re talking and thinking about software-engineering roles, we’re thinking about not just, how can I do these particular aspects of building this application, but how do I have the skills where I can have even more on top of that?

Blumenstyk: And is it your sense that the computer-science programs at colleges just aren’t equipped to teach that?

Ellison: Well, you know computer-science programs tend to not change all that much from year to year. They focus on computer-science fundamentals, more preparing people to be computer scientists and professors. A curriculum that doesn’t change that quickly year to year, compared to industry, you have a technology changing every couple of months. So that naturally creates a huge gap. And so computer-science programs tend to just choose not to focus on those — they’ll say this — “here today, gone tomorrow” technologies.

And it makes sense, because they care about more professors, more research, and so forth. But at the same time, the companies are left out. And then you also have a lot of schools not having enough CS professors, being under-resourced themselves. So gaps in curriculum, but also gaps in support for students.

Blumenstyk: Let’s roll it back a little bit. I want to make sure I really understand. Are you a curriculum? Are you a college? Are you professors? What are you?

Ellison: So we’re not trying to be a school. We are a curriculum, but also we have a platform and we help universities be able to have really powerful, peer-to-peer, student teaching and learning networks. That’s a bit of a mouthful, but let me try to unpack with an example. So you’re a student at Howard University, and you’re seeing CodePath courses in your course roster. The way they got into that course roster is that a semester in advance, CodePath actually put your professor and students through a free training program.

When you then start participating in the course, then CodePath is actually running the playbook for these courses in more of a flipped-classroom type of way. You’re in person with your professor and with the trained student TAs two to four hours a week. You log into CodePath for 10 to 15 hours a week, where we provide this personalized support that you wouldn’t actually get in any type of college experience. You have a homework question at 2:00 a.m.; it’s answered within 30 minutes.

So the way that we’re integrating in these different college and university programs is by helping to fill a gap with existing courses that are hard for these universities to teach, but also providing this extra layer in this classroom, optimizing the classroom. Think of it as, what if we could give every professor an Iron Man suit? They have control, and they’re able to change things and maneuver things as they want.

But CodePath is trying to make your time a lot more efficient. And we’re focusing that efficiency on, how do we engage students? How do we have that layer of support, adding mentorship in the classroom? But then also, how can we make sure that the curriculum that you’re providing is very much aligned with what the best in the industry expect your students to have when they graduate?

Blumenstyk: And where do you stand now? How many campuses are you working on? Roughly how many students are you serving?

Ellison: So we are on over 50 campuses this spring, serving around 2,600 students, which is more students than all of last year. So we’re on track to more than double for this year, for the total number of students taught. Probably reaching over 5,000.

Blumenstyk: I’m guessing that there’s some things about this program that give students an advantage. And your interest is in making sure that the students who have been historically unrepresented in the tech fields get this leg up to help them compete for careers and jobs. So how do you pick your schools? Because I could imagine at some point, enough schools get onto this program, too, and then suddenly the schools that need it the least are suddenly getting more advantage, and the divide even deepens more.

Ellison: School selection is really important, so I’m glad that you’re asking this. We care about diversity. We’re focused on serving underrepresented minorities and students from low-income backgrounds, first-generation college students. But in order to do that, because we’re a layer inside of these CS programs, we need to pay close attention to where are the students that follow that criteria. So we actually have a list, and we know the next 90 that we need to be in to make the biggest impact in the next couple of years.

We are not against Stanford or MIT or those programs, but we just think that our resources are going to be highest leveraged for those students that are a little bit further away, especially the students where employers are just not even going to their campuses.

Blumenstyk: And I guess getting the employers to respond to CodePath programs and CodePath schools is one of the key factors for success here. How do you make that happen?

Ellison: So it’s actually more challenging than you might imagine. You have the organizations that are creating talent. They’re spending a lot of time to nurture and help people mature and get up to the point where they’re ready, bridging the skills gap and confidence gap some more. And then you have organizations which — there’s many more of these — where it’s just, find people. It’s a platform, it’s a new AI thing, it’s whatever.

And so when we’re talking with employers, then it’s not just good enough for CodePath to be able to produce top talent, which we do. It’s also that we have to stand out from the noise, we need to provide them with people that they would have never seen before. And we have to do that at high scale, and high numbers, and high consistency — these underrepresented minorities and women and people from disadvantaged backgrounds. It’s not just that diversity is generally good for business. This is going to raise the caliber of your engineering teams.

Blumenstyk: And on that note, let’s take a moment now for a message from our sponsor.

Mike Belcher: Hi, I’m Mike Belcher, HP’s Director of EdTech Innovation. And I just want to take a couple of minutes here to talk to you about something that has been a passion of mine for about the last five or six years. And we think it’s where, coming toward at least a lessening of some of the challenges around the pandemic, we’re starting to figure this out. We’re going to see a ton of funding come into education, both in K-12 and in higher education. Something like $67 billion between the last two stimulus components, just for higher education.

We think we really need to move around thinking through, how do we take these one-time funding dollars and maximize long-term benefit for our students? And so the areas I’m going to talk to you about are really wrapped around a better understanding of where job growth will occur, and how do we start to connect students and faculty to what those futures might look like. And so one of the things that drives us right now is thinking about the growth rates of new jobs that are coming into market.

And if you look at the World Economic Forum, they believe we’re going to see by the end of this decade, 75 million jobs go away, but 133 million new ones take their place. And those are all going to be built around STEM subject areas, or some connection of STEM into the majority of those jobs. And the Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies will be the big instigator in that. And so this next generation of jobs with a STEM background have higher rates of pay, where you can support yourself and a family on them.

In technology, we have a huge opportunity to get more women and more students of color into these opportunities. So reaching them early in the pre-K-12 area, but definitely once we get into college, we need to be pointing them toward where this growth rate is going to occur. And we really think that one of the key areas is going to be really fundamentally about data science. But we also think we’re going to see lots of opportunity to come out of additive manufacturing with 3-D printing. So it’s not traditional manufacturing.

This is taking empty shopping centers, empty warehouses, inputting these big, commercial-level 3-D printers, and the ability to start doing localized custom manufacturing at small scale, and then ramp as you need to. And then the last area, that is the ability to do situational learning through extended reality. So tools like augmented and virtual reality will become standard in how we deliver experiences for students. But the cool thing about this increase in demand is all related to STEM and Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies.

So your top-increasing jobs are data analysts and scientists, AI and machine-learning specialists, big-data specialists. These are typically six-figure-type jobs, and they are interesting. And they’re going to be integrated into almost everything we do. From marketing to sales, to customer interactions, etc., data and the analysis of this data and using artificial intelligence to help us make better decisions will be integrated into almost everything we do.

So this is one of those areas that we would highly urge you to dive into, learn more, so that you can make those better decisions and better educate your faculty and your students on what their future looks like. So World Economic Forum is one of those places we would urge you to look into if you’d like to learn more about those technologies. HP’s Megatrends, hpmegatrends.com, is a great place to go, where our HP Labs scientists are looking at the future and inventing this next generation of technologies and how they’ll be used.

We hope this was helpful. If we can help in any other way, please don’t hesitate to reach out. It’s mike.belcher@hp.com, and we surely appreciate your time. Thanks again.

Blumenstyk: Thanks for that. We’re back now. And hello, again. I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, here to continue the conversation with Michael Ellison, the CEO and co-founder of CodePath. When you try to get into a college campus, do you ever get resistance from faculty members?

Maybe they wouldn’t say it out loud, but maybe this feels a little threatening to me, or they don’t really trust this newfangled thing that’s coming along. They want to teach fundamentals because they believe in that. How do you get past some of that resistance?

Ellison: We believe in fundamentals deeply. We created three different courses that are reinforcing fundamentals, and we have another course that is meant to help to prepare students to better succeed in their freshman introductory CS courses. So again, it’s not replacing anything. It is genuinely supplementing, which means there’s different courses depending on the campus. There certainly are professors that they’re not quite the nicest when you are approaching them.

Blumenstyk: I hear you trying to be very diplomatic here.

Ellison: Yeah, well, I empathize with the challenging position a lot of professors are in, where they don’t have enough time. They have research on top of teaching on top of all these responsibilities. And then someone dumps a new curriculum on their desk and says, “Hey, learn this and teach this next semester.” And they’re like, “You’re just giving me a book? Do I have any support? Are you paying me any extra?”

So there’s a lot of different pieces. But we found it effective to also provide incentives for professors, to be very professor-centric. So at Howard University, they would leverage CodePath for newer professors because we provide so much support not just for the students but also for the professors. So even if a professor is earlier and not as familiar with the material, then that’s actually okay.

At Cal State-Monterey Bay, we have courses that are part of their three-year accelerated CS program, where the professor of record doesn’t know the material because they trust CodePath that much to be able to deliver that course. So the shortage of CS professors we see across college campuses, especially at minority-serving institutions that often have less resources, CodePath is actually seen as really helpful because we’re providing so much and we don’t charge you anything. And I think the other —

Blumenstyk: Wait, say that again. You don’t charge anything for these courses?

Ellison: We’re free. We’re free, free for faculty, students. Sometimes they’ll compare us to other programs that are trying to charge a percentage of tuition. We are trying to unlock capacity, unlock potential of students and faculty. And we know the barriers our students are facing. When I was in school, I would almost cry when I saw the prices for books every semester. So we’re about creating [situations] as frictionless as possible for schools to not just work with us, but also drive massive benefits from increased capacity, free training for their professors. And then the other thing I wanted to mention is student support is big. Personalization support, confidence belonging in tech, that’s where you have to start. I had a recent conversation, I’m not going to say the school. I had a recent conversation with a professor, and they were like, “Well, you’ve been running these student-led courses and students seem to like it, but I just don’t really care about what the industry wants. I want everyone to be a professor.” And then I was like, “Yeah, well, but we do offer a lot of support for the students.”

And then he said, “Wait, wait. Support? Well, we don’t have enough — it’s hard for us to offer enough support for our students. Tell me more about that.” I said, “Oh, well, mentorship is a part of our courses. We had over a thousand professional engineers volunteering to provide mentorship for our students. We like to break students into small pods because the most effective online-learning environment actually feels like a small classroom. That’s how we’ve integrated this into all of our classes.”

So it’s meeting them where they are. But also speaking I think, to the pain points the faculty have, or even just what we know works with students from disadvantaged backgrounds: more support, more guidance, more mentorship. That helps them to stay in the CS track. Back before we had credibility on college campuses, we actually just went to students directly. We said, “Do you want to run this course? Here’s this curriculum. We’ll put you through the training.” And students were overwhelmingly excited because they are aware that their curriculum has gaps.

That’s typically how we have built trust in the past, as well, with faculty, because when they saw that students were spending 10 to 15 hours a week for a non-credit course, on top of all their four-credit courses, they got excited because they saw that this was something valuable.

Blumenstyk: And I want to make sure I understand, so how does CodePath survive? Do you have revenue from this in any way?

Ellison: We are a nonprofit, right. People give donations and grants and all that. But we’ve actually been very successful with recruiting at scale. And in particular for organizations that have very high technical bars or special requirements. It turns out a lot of companies, even if they don’t care that much about diversity, or they pretend they care about diversity and they don’t, they do care about people who have the skills that they need in order to build the technologies of the future.

But then we also are able to leverage our insight into the classroom, our insight into these students who are otherwise invisible. It’s something that companies just don’t have. They don’t have a course over at Purdue and a course over at Cal State-Monterey Bay and Merritt College in Oakland. They can’t compare across all these different sites and be able to understand who fits best. And so that ability to leverage data, to have a much more curated matching from a role in a skill-specific standpoint, has made a number of companies big fans of CodePath.

Blumenstyk: And what about internship opportunities? I know people talk about that a lot as something that is hard. It’s certainly harder for lower-income students to take on an internship, especially because some of them are not paid and people can’t afford to give up a summer without working. Are you able to provide work experience for students along the way?

Ellison: Yes, we have a variety of ways providing direct work experience. We actually thought naїvely, we were like, “Well, we’ll just fill the skills gap. We’ll just put the courses on the campus. These are great courses. These engineers inside of these companies take the same courses, so this is going to fix it.” That ended up not working. The first couple of years of CodePath, we were building a course that we thought would correlate to their on-the-job performance. And then they just wouldn’t get hired by anyone.

And so we were stunned and a little bit demoralized, but we realized that there are a couple of reasons why. One is a lot of companies just don’t go to the campuses where these students are at. So one of my favorite alumni I love — I have lots of favorite alumni, I don’t want anyone to feel bad — but one that I connected with recently, Peter Akala, he went to the College of Southern Nevada. And he grew up in a low-income background. And when he got to college, he was actually so advanced that the faculty wanted to hire him to help teach.

He just loved programming. But he was trying to apply to companies, and he didn’t hear back from anyone. He applied to hundreds, didn’t hear back from anyone. And he told me on the call, super sad. He told me, “Black people don’t get internships.”

Blumenstyk: What’d you do?

Ellison: Well thankfully, at this point we’d learned our lesson from a couple of years earlier and we have this summer-long course, 12 weeks long, 15 hours a week. If you have a job during the summer, you can take it. It’s a nights-and-weekends type of thing, but very intensive. We have three different layers of this course that correlate to passing technical interviews. It has mock interviews with professional engineers.

We very much have a philosophy of: If you want someone to be able to succeed doing something, have the coursework match as closely as possible to that experience. And then Peter took that course. He loved it. Being able to see people that look like you is important as well. We had a Black Excellence Series as well. That was part of this. And —

Blumenstyk: What does that mean, that series?

Ellison: Oh, Black Excellence Leadership Series? Well, we like to bring exceptional female and Black and Latinx engineers to speak to our students, to encourage them, to tell them to go for that opportunity they don’t feel they’re qualified for. But that they should, because they actually are, and they just don’t realize it. Peter — actually, there’s a lot of details around this that are super cool, what happened — participating in that summer course gave him access to our Virtual Career Fair, where, if you are a student in that Virtual Career Fair, you don’t need a résumé. We will match you to employers, and employers would interview you even if you don’t have work experience, and even if you don’t go to a school that they would ever visit. And then Peter ended up getting multiple offers in this career fair, interned at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, which this was a new thing for them. This was the first time the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta had hired outside of their core, their top-20 core schools.

And they loved Peter, gave him a return offer. Peter ended up accepting the return offer. He’s a full-time software engineer for them now, and he’s already been promoted. He started in the fall, and he’s already been promoted. So it gives you the flavor. There’s this incredible wealth of missed talent out there. There’s talent that’s just about ready, but they’re invisible. There’s talent that — they’re not quite ready — but they don’t need that much time — they need the right support in order to get them ready. And CodePath is trying to stand at the intersection of both of those.

Blumenstyk: I’m wondering how CodePath built credibility in the industry, and I’m even thinking specifically about you. Do you think if you had not been so successful in your own tech career, that people would be taking you and CodePath as seriously as they now do?

Ellison: Definitely not. Silicon Valley, whether it’s entrepreneurship, whether it’s in raising money from venture capitalists, you have to find a way to get in the room in the first place. And it’s shocking how hard it is when you’re on the outside and how easy it is when you’re on the inside to make things happen. With CodePath, I think we were already insiders. I had founded multiple companies, my co-founders had founded multiple companies.

If we were outsiders, I think it just wouldn’t have worked. I see organizations that I admire, except they’re outside Silicon Valley and they don’t have access. And they’re never going to be able to break in. Even if you do get into the room, it’s not going to be a welcoming room. You’re not going to feel like you want to be in the room, and people are going to make you know that you don’t belong in that room.

Blumenstyk: Obviously, coding bootcamps are a very hot thing right now. A lot of colleges are feeling pressure to add them on as addendums to their own academic programs, or creating other kinds of relationships, or certainly students are going to them on their own. How do you differentiate what you do from the whole bootcamp movement that’s out there right now?

Ellison: There’s an importance of personalization when you’re trying to effectively serve students. And bootcamps, as well as a lot of training programs, have more of a one-size-fits-all approach. Oh, well, what did you do before? Well, here’s the path. Here’s Step 1, here’s Step 2, here’s Step 3.

We will do an assessment up front before courses, and then we’ll guide you to the course that’s the right level of rigor for where you currently are. Because we’ve realized that, say the sweet spot is 10 hours a week per assignment. That level of rigor correlates to you feeling like it’s challenging, but not impossible. And you become somewhat addicted, almost, to the learning process. We personalize and evaluate where students are and try to, as specifically as we can, scope the gap that they have, because we know it increases confidence and their completion rate. But then also it’s more predictable with the level of technical ability they reach.

Blumenstyk: So it’s interesting.These students actually develop a community beyond their own college. They have community across the country of fellow students and then maybe even some alumni?

Ellison: Oh, yes, completely, because we have consistency with the curriculum across all these different campuses. So we have students from Howard University who are effectively TA-ing and supporting students at say, Mississippi State or Alabama A&M. It’s really wonderful, and we’ve tried to incentivize that as much as possible. For example, there’s a part of our platform where students can earn money by answering each other’s questions within a certain period of time.

So there are these students that become obsessed with helping to support other students, and they make a decent amount of money. It’s just incredible to see students so excited to help other students. And then I think our highest accomplishment is not just this person is a proficient software engineer with a great trajectory, it’s that this person also has been lifting and pulling other people with them. They’ve fallen in love with mentoring and teaching themselves.

Blumenstyk: How do we know what CodePath does right now, that it works?

Ellison: CodePath teaches more Black computer-science students than the number that graduated from all HBCUs in this country in 2019. Black computer-science students who take a CodePath course are 43 — four three — times more likely to get one of the most competitive technical roles. And we measure competitiveness. We’re not just like, “Oh, you had a job in tech.” No, no, no. There are certain types of roles that we consider to be the most competitive.

And we also rank companies in terms of competitiveness. There are some companies that are the hardest to get into, and that’s what we’re holding ourselves accountable to. We’re taking students from backgrounds that they don’t go after, and we’re competing with Stanfords and MITs in terms of a recruiting conversion rate. We’re very intentionally trying to make sure we fill up the gaps across different areas. And we do have some early impressive data that indicates that, for example, Latinx and Black women are just as likely as the white men that are in some of our courses to get, say, a technical job or internship.

Blumenstyk: Michael, I want to be sure to ask you this question, because we hear a lot of companies talking right now, not just from Silicon Valley, but from all around the country, about wanting to do a better job of recruiting more people of color, more Black students, more Latinx students. I know recruiting is really important, but what else should they be doing?

Ellison: If companies are talking about and interested in racial equity, and if they’re interested in systemic change, if they’re interested in addressing structural racism, then their actions need to reflect that they are moving beyond thinking quarter to quarter about these issues. So an example would be, who can I recruit for my internship right now? They’re looking at the part of the population that’s already prepared, that already made it through and jumped through all the hoops.

If they were to change the internal narrative to, “What’s the most effective thing we can do to drive change over the next three years or five years?” then they’re going to focus more on a set of solutions that are rooted in racial equity, systemic change. And that’s going to make them think more about the pipeline and the size of the pipeline. They’re going to think about creating programs that inspire high-school students, and give them an on-ramp, and do early exposure to the technologies that they want them to be excited [about] and fall in love with.

They’re going to think about the sad state of early internships — freshmen, sophomore internships that are critical in order for you to then be evaluated for very challenging-to-get junior-year internships. And they’re going to think, “What’s our role in that? Should we have programs? Should we even have something that has our employees volunteer or purchase pay in panels, or more structurally engage and support the lack of resources across these CS institutions?” But it really is in the best interest of the company. They just need to change the timeline that they’re thinking about this.

Blumenstyk: Hey, Michael, thanks so much for joining us today.

Ellison: Well, thanks. It was great to be here. I really appreciate it.

Blumenstyk: This has been Innovation That Matters, a Chronicle of Higher Education podcast sponsored by HP. For additional episodes, look for us on the Chronicle website, or your favorite podcast app. I’m Goldie Blumenstyk.