“You know, I believe that technology is the great leveler. Technology permits anybody to play. And in some ways, I think technology — it’s not only a great tool for democratization, but it’s a great tool for eliminating prejudice.”

Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, said that to TechCrunch in 2010, but the line from then to now is the graph of our growing disenchantment with tech. Tech was supposed to unify society and increase inclusion, but for the most part it hasn’t worked out that way.

Long before its current crises, tech gained a reputation for elitism, ”brogrammer“ culture, and an overrepresentation of white and East Asian men (albeit with mostly white ones in management.) Moreover, because tech roles have seemed inaccessible to those without a technical degree, the sector’s high-paying jobs have been assumed to exacerbate social divides, not narrow them.

And, in fact, our recent research on the “digitalization” of the economy confirms the disturbing potential of digital technologies to polarize as much as they empower. Most computer occupations do favor those with a college degree or more. Likewise, our research confirms the gross underrepresentation of women and black and Latinx employees in digital occupations. Women have actually lost share in computer and math occupations, having dwindled to just 25.5% of employment in those occupations in 2016. For their part, black and Latinx workers have together ticked up only slightly since 2002, to 14.7% of the digital workforce in 2016. So, there is good reason to discount the promise of tech to promote inclusive prosperity.

And yet, new evidence and experiments provide some hope that tech can be a force for inclusion after all. For tech to live up to that potential, though, two things need to happen. First, everyone involved needs to recognize that tech jobs are more diverse in their requirements than most people think. For instance, as our research demonstrates, a large number of tech jobs don’t require a college degree. And second, the tech industry needs to partner with new and different institutions in order to make inclusion a priority. Partnerships with historically black colleges and universities are one promising avenue. Taken together, the reality of tech job descriptions and the potential of new partnerships offer real hope for improving inclusion.

Tech Jobs Don’t All Require Advanced Degrees

To start with, basic employment data signals one kind of hope. Specifically, it’s easy to overlook the fact that there are lots of good-paying tech jobs that don’t require a college or graduate degree — a fact that’s way overshadowed by the many headlines focused on the spiraling salaries for top AI scholars or the rising inequality in San Francisco. Researchers at Burning Glass Technologies and other organizations have for several years pointed to the existence of a “middle skill” zone of high tech, based on analyses of job openings data. Such discussion of “new collar” jobs has given credence to the idea that tech might be a more accessible source of upward mobility for blue-collar workers and places, as well as underrepresented populations, than has been previously assumed.

Our latest analyses at Brookings support that view. A surprisingly large share of tech jobs are actually held by workers without a bachelor’s degree, meaning they are accessible to such workers. Here’s what that “mid-tech” segment of employment looks like:

 

As the table shows, nearly 40% of computer network architects, computer network support specialists, and computer systems analysts lack a bachelor’s degree. Since these occupations contain some 914,000 workers, that means that fully 350,000 positions are currently filled by workers without a college degree. Add in the additional 160,000 or so non-BA workers employed in the 10 other computer and math occupations, and you arrive at a total of half a million core technical workers in high tech — some 17% — who lack a bachelor’s degree.

Our conclusion: Tech’s voracious need for talent, combined with its growth and accessibility, represents a genuine opportunity for greater workplace inclusion and progress, especially for people of color and those from less educated backgrounds — all potentially to be facilitated outside the usual university-based talent networks.

What might that look like? One idea is to scale up new models of code schools or tech “bootcamps.” These programs deliver in-demand digital skills to underrepresented groups and help job seekers enter tech through paid apprenticeships and job placement. Often, they do so while subsidizing or otherwise eliminating the up-front costs for students. This is what the St. Louis program LaunchCode is doing, having figured out how to get paid handsomely for the delivery of trained talent to major employers. LaunchCode has worked with 5,000 students in recent years, and placed 1,000 of them into tech-sector apprenticeships or as direct hires earning more than $50,000 a year as front-end, back-end, full-stack, or mobile developers. Of those hires, 50% were previously unemployed and 37% are people of color. To be sure, the program is open to anyone who is interested, and with that comes a high rate of attrition. Nonetheless, LaunchCode is creating a path into tech that’s far more accessible than the typical route of a four-year degree in computer science.

The Tech Industry Should Partner with Historically Black Colleges and Universities

And there are other models worth exploring to improve racial inclusion in high-tech entrepreneurship and within the tech industry. Internships and module-styled bootcamps can help, but without the social networks and technical skills that institutions like colleges provide, students can’t connect fully with tech opportunities, including those made possible by the deep-pocketed investors who sponsor tech startups, which currently offer the fastest pathway to individual wealth. That’s why we are urging historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to make room for bootcamps, incubators, and accelerators as a supplement to their current educational offerings.

The outlines of how this might work are beginning to come into focus. Morehouse College, for example, has partnered with Opportunity HUB (OHUB), an Atlanta-based multi-campus coworking space, pre-accelerator, incubator, and inclusive ecosystem platform to launch OHUB@Morehouse, an on-campus lab available to all Atlanta University Center students — including Spelman College and Clark Atlanta University — aimed at providing students with new opportunities to build and launch products, refine pitches, and network in the innovation, entrepreneurship, and investment ecosystem. (OHUB is led by entrepreneur Rodney Sampson, who is a Brookings nonresident senior fellow.)

And while OHUB works with AUC students, it also works with students across the county. For example, for the last four years OHUB has produced HBCU@SXSW (SXSW is the popular annual gathering in Austin, Texas, that explores “what’s next in the worlds of film, culture, music, and technology”) as an immersive early exposure and job placement initiative. Ninety percent of the 275 students who have participated in HBCU@SXSW have gone on to work at top companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Deloitte, MailChimp, Comcast, and Capital One. Now, OHUB has 70-plus campus chapters in the process of being formed by student cofounders at colleges and universities around the country. Overall, students join OHUB to level up their technical and nontechnical skills to access careers in tech, identify entrepreneurship resources, and tap investment opportunities. Over the next 12 months the goal is to engage 10,000 new OHUB members at 100 colleges and universities.

This is a compelling convergence. HBCUs have always served the unique needs of African-American students. One challenge they face is to attend to their students’ financial aid needs by reducing costs. And that’s where the new partnerships come in. Roughly three-quarters of HBCU students are eligible for a Pell Grant, a federal grant given to students who can demonstrate need. Giving students a shorter pathway to their career through bootcamps, incubators, and accelerators seems to be a logical next step. Reducing the time it takes to get a degree or certificate will save cash-strapped students money. This kind of arrangement will also give students the social connections that college provides — and new and different ones that these tech partnerships offer.

The tech sector doesn’t have to be a divider. Leaders in the industry have shown an interest in recruiting people outside of elite tech university circles. However, they have not built bridges to HBCUs, where there is a high degree of talent. HBCUs must also make adjustments and boldly alter their curricula to meet the financial demands of their students. Of course, these are not the only ways to make tech more inclusive. More needs to be done inside and outside the industry to ensure inclusivity in terms of race, gender, class, and more. But as our research demonstrates, tech can be a force for inclusion.

from HBR.org https://ift.tt/2wlpdLz