CodePath in the News: Michael Ellison Appears on NBC LX to discuss racial equity in tech

2020 Will undoubtedly go down in history as the year when the world came together in a final stand demanding real world solutions to social justice tech firms big and small made some pretty bold promises to fight racial equity but the challenge ahead is actually making good on those promises and it all starts with who is actually part of the tech industry today we are talking with the ceo and the founder of CodePath.org michael ellison thanks for being with us today michael first tell us more about CodePath what what do you do so CodePath is a nonprofit organization we’re focused on increasing diversity in the tech sector and fundamentally we’re about trying to remove luck from the equation right now if you’re an underrepresented minority then the default path is actually failure eighty percent of black students are dropping out within the first couple years of entering computer science programs in this country and we want to make sure that across every college and university program in the country the default path for unrepresented minorities is actually success and we do that working with big tech companies and changing what’s being taught and how it’s being taught in these computer science programs and so can you dive into that more how exactly are you making these changes so historically we’ve done training inside major tech companies and we’ve now partnered with them in order to bring elite software engineering training inside of these college camps so your local college we’re at over 60 colleges and universities this spring you’ll see copac in your course roster we have trained professors and students to be run to run these courses and we also provide extra support grading each semester so we’re something that has we’ve embedded ourselves inside of these computer science programs to make sure that multiple years of training that previously wasn’t accessible is accessible to you where you are that is awesome so years ago big tech like apple like google like facebook they they started releasing these annual diversity reports in an attempt to be more transparent about the diversity on its staff and kind of hold them accountable what do you think about these reports have they worked the reports by themselves it’s it’s really just pr it’s it’s something but it’s not something that is thoughtful it’s not rooted in racial equity racial equity is about changing the status quo how do you change structural racism to not be the norm anymore so if tech companies want to go beyond just doing something to say they’re doing something then they’ll start by trying to recruit at places they haven’t normally looked at most tech recruiting is out of top 20 computer science programs in the country when the majority of computer science students are across 900 computer science institutions but they have to go much further than that they have to think about how can we change the actual tech talent pipeline to be much more supportive to counteract the massive attrition we see freshmen sophomore year on these college campuses how do we ensure that the system becomes one that by default you’re kept in and set on a path for success versus one where you’re not on a path for success so it’s really about investing much more in these communities and if I had a magic wand I would make every single student in the country have work experience technical work experience in their undergraduate experience as a part of their studies and not something that they have to take herculean efforts to go and find out and try to figure out on their own yeah absolutely I agree with that I wish I had that when I was in college so you’re saying the root problem of it all lies within the system how else do you seek to help tech companies big tech kind of rebuild the the conversation and rebuild the pipeline so we we’ve taken a very strong interest in trying to provide very early work opportunities directly for students the primary path into tech is the technical internship the majority of entry-level software engineers they have computer science degrees and if you don’t have any previous work experience via an internship or something similar you’re not going to get looked at you’re invisible to employers so starting with efforts that we’ve done for years working with facebook running diversity internship programs for them to provide early career experience for students we’ve started to expand and work with more organizations like workday and and and more to try to really focus more of this effort on the earliest work opportunities that combat attrition that increase confidence that provide mentorship but most importantly once you have that critical early work experience on your resume you’re set up for success it’s it’s like you can now enter the club you start getting connected to a network so that’s really one of our major core focuses and expansions over the next couple years that’s awesome all right michael ellison the ceo and founder of CodePath.org thank you so much for having this conversation with us thank you