The answer is buried three quarters of the way into the article:
> When they started interviewing seniors, companies found — as Pratt did at Howard — that many were underprepared. They hadn’t been exposed to programming before college and had gaps in their college classes.
So why isn't the article titled, "Why Aren't Enough Black Coders Prepared for Silicon Valley"?
It felt like they only had a smattering of CS courses, none of which pushed them very hard.
In other words, they should fix their curriculum.
I am mentoring a CS student at another university and have had some challenges bringing this student along because the fundamentals are just not being taught. I took some time to compare it to Howard's curriculum, and I see some really practical courses offered at Howard - a 1 credit intro to OO and Java, Unix Lab, etc. Not that these make one a computer scientist, but when hiring entry level kids out of college, I would expect these skills to be somewhat solid, and that is not the case with really any CS programs today.
But I can't fix the world. It's not my fault that at non-top-20 colleges they fail to teach basic things.
Cost is a huge consideration for prospective college student, especially since the onset of the Great Recession.
Furthermore, quality education is available at (I would estimate) most institutions of higher learning. It's just that the students have to do some research to find out who the good professors are at the less prestigious schools.
I think you are doing yourself, your company, and the graduates of less prestigious institutions of higher learning a great disservice being so dismissive toward "lesser" schools.
Especially people that aren't coming from wealthy families, as their need based aid programs will pay 100%.
You shouldn't leave the elite programs out of the equation. I've helped to interview a good handful of people who went to elite institutions and had done difficult, important work, but couldn't answer our interview questions correctly. We don't even use hard interview questions, just three that expect you to know some tricks-of-the-trade for systems programming and basic processor architecture.
> People tend to discuss Silicon Valley’s diversity problem in binary terms. One camp says companies are biased against underrepresented minorities, or at least aren’t trying hard enough to attract them. The other says there aren’t enough people from these backgrounds who are qualified for positions—or at least who are good enough to beat those Stanford grads with all the programming trophies and internship experience and Mozart-like childhoods. The reality is, both are true.
I've heard that idea in a lot of places, but it's never matched up with my personal experiences. I did my undergraduate at CMU, and plenty of the better programmers there I knew hadn't done any programming before they came to CMU.
But of course, this too is anecdata.
I think most people would say yes except to play devil's advocate. Becoming a top caliber athlete requires years of conditioning, experience predicting trajectories of fast moving targets, ability to read your competitors, mental fortitude, flexiblity, and more. Why would we expect a field that prides itself with top caliber professionals in a competitive environment to be any different?
To my mind, the fields which are known for requiring training from childhood are sports and the performing arts (music, theatre).
And if I had to guess, I'd speculate this is less because it's intensely difficult to play sports or learn to play music, but because so few people can become professionally successful in these fields (there's only room for so many sports/music/film stars). CS doesn't have this problem (the demand for programmers is skyrocketing), so we shouldn't expect folks who learned to program in childhood to have any more than a mild-to-modest advantage.
What early education provides is a safety net when things become tough. My classmates without this preparation had a much more difficult path and many eventually dropped out. The psychological effect of impostor syndrome is a component to picking field to study in college; those who feel they have a harder time than their peers are less likely to continue in the field long term.
1. CMU is the top CS school nationally; the basic quality of the education makes up for the lack of previous experience
2. CMU crafted a program specifically for students without previous experience to counter this effect; most schools do not
I had the same experience as a graduate of a mid tier public college. Finally a recruiter from a big company laid it out for me -- they have a list of schools they recruit from, period unless you are referred.