With Silicon Valley firms under scrutiny as recent employment disclosures show little racial and gender diversity at top firms, a new analysis finds that the nation’s leading research universities produce African-American and Latino graduates with computer science or computer engineering degrees at twice the rate leading companies hire them.
The finding, documented in an analysis conducted by the USA Today newspaper, reveals that on average seven leading Silicon Valley firms had just 2 percent Black and 3 percent Latino employees in technology jobs. In contrast, 4.5 percent of new graduates with bachelor’s degrees in computer science or computer engineering from 179 research universities were Black, and 6.5 percent were Hispanic, according to Computing Research Association (CRA) data.
As for the total base of U.S. computer science programs, the National Center for Education Statistics reports that Blacks and Latinos comprise a total of 18 percent of 2012 computer science graduates, the USA Today analysis says. USA Today’s research includes employment statistics from Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and Yahoo and computing education data from the CRA’s annual Taulbee Survey.
While technology firms have typically placed blame on a talent pipeline that executives say produces too few Black and Latino applicants for highly-sought Silicon Valley jobs, educators are pointing to the new analysis as evidence that firms are failing to cast a wide enough net to reel in existing talent.
“What you have is that these companies recruit from the same places all the time. And those places coincidentally don’t have high numbers of minorities,” says Dr. Juan Gilbert, the Andrew Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair in the University of Florida’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering department.
“If you keep doing that and say ‘we can’t find qualified people,’” then that becomes reality for the companies that are recruiting talent, adds Gilbert, who is a nationally-recognized scholar in the recruitment and mentorship of African-American computer science Ph.D.s.
