[gchallen]

I find this unsurprising. But I think the problem is upstream.

Getting into a top-tier CS program has gotten incredibly competitive, and college has gotten incredibly expensive. At Illinois (where I teach), the university admits 40% of its applicants. Our CS program admits 7%, and a demographic profile that bears no relationship to the broader university population. Relevant to this article, far more out-of-state students, and therefore students from wealthier backgrounds. (Because our out-of-state tuition is insane.)

So if lower-income students can't get internships, it's probably because it's hard for them to get into a decent CS program in the first place.

And from where I sit, the situation is even more frustrating, because we have thousands of data points showing that students drawn from the general university population can and do succeed in our CS courses—at least those required for the minor, which has become increasingly popular. But a lot of CS departments have felt increasingly besieged over the past few decades, as we've been swamped with students and frequently not been provided with appropriate resources. (Although there's also plenty of programs out there insisting on doing things that don't scale well, which exacerbates the problem.) So increasingly the "answer" is to clamp down on admissions, in ways that usually disproportionately affect certain populations.

We have a lot of ongoing BPC and DEI efforts in my department. But there's very little if any focus on admissions. I asked recently, and apparently we don't even know the demographic breakdown of our applicant pool.

Regardless of what aspects of diversity you care about, one of the biggest sources of inequity in CS today is in university admissions.

[kerkeslager]

> So if lower-income students can't get internships, it's probably because it's hard for them to get into a decent CS program in the first place.

Sure. But every big tech company has relationships with universities, and has billions of dollars to invest, and would easily recover in the form of talent if they invested in education, even before the undergraduate level. I've worked at small consulting firms that were able to provide a few scholarships on much smaller budgets.

You're right to hold academia responsible as well, but a big reason that systemic problems like this aren't fixed is that the responsibility for fixing them is spread out across a lot of different groups. This lets any individual group point the finger at another group not doing their part in fixing the problem and use that as an excuse for not doing their part in fixing the problem. People are doing that all over this thread.

Kudos to you for doing your part and acknowledging university admissions as part of the problem, but I'd be less eager to hold big tech blameless.