This might be why there are few Black engineers in Big Tech
By The Washington Post
By Nitasha Tiku
For years, Google's recruiting department used a college ranking system to set budgets and priorities for hiring new engineers. Some schools such as Stanford University and MIT were predictably in the "elite" category, while state schools or institutions that churn out thousands of engineering grads annually, such as Georgia Tech, were assigned to "tier 1" or "tier 2."
But one category of higher education was missing from Google's ranking system, according to several current and former Google employees involved in recruitment, despite the company's pledges to promote racial diversity - historically Black colleges and universities, also known as HBCUs. That framework meant that those schools were at a lower priority for hiring, even though Google had said in 2014 that it wanted to partner with HBCUsas a way to recruit more minority talent.