Black History Month KB News is celebrating the
contributions Black Americans have made to our community.
People like Matt Stevenson,
the C co founder and CEO of co to college nonprofit
dedicated to increasing the number of minority and low income,
high school students who enter stem
undergraduate majors and careers. Hello, Matt, welcome back. Hello, Jenny.
So good to see you.
Yeah, it's been a hot minute since Matt has been here with us here at Kew.
But uh congratulate
on code to college and
how far it's come.
So, first of all, we introduced you to Matt back in 2018 when code to college.
Just a couple of years old. That's
right. First, tell us about code to college, the goal and how far it's come?
Absolutely.
So code to college is a stem equity and workforce development nonprofit.
We were born and scaled here in Austin, Texas.
Uh I oftentimes say there's nowhere else we could
have scaled to this size um other than Austin.
Um but we employ a skills based volunteer program
model by which we deliver after school coding education,
uh professional development and stem equity exposure
to high school students who are mostly black, brown and girls.
Um Since 2016, we've now served over 5000 high school students,
most of them here in Central Texas, which is really exciting.
I mean, that's got to have exceeded your expectations.
I absolutely 5000. Yeah, we, you know, the
couple of years you start this off and think this would be good for the community.
Maybe we'll serve a couple of 100 students. But I mean, what we've been able to do
through the collaboration with partners like Atlassian, like Getty, like Google
big names as well as the many volunteers
who support us over 1000 volunteers per year.
It's just been incredible. So what's the secret sauce to the program's success?
Sure.
So uh it's collaboration, honestly,
the fact that we are leveraging community resources to make this impact, you know,
we engage with these volunteers from companies who are
software engineers who are developers who are outside of
technical roles and say you have something to offer.
There are so many times where you'll meet a professional who say I want to give back.
I just don't know how and we are saying what you do on a daily basis,
you are an expert at and there are students who
want to learn about it and here's how and here's how
than that platform. Let's back up a little bit. How does code to college work?
How do you identify students? How can they express interest? What happens Sure.
So we've got partnerships with about 40 high schools across the country.
Again, most of them here in central Texas,
we promote our application which is online.
It's, it's quite brief,
but we are looking to identify students who
just have some passing interest to learn more.
It's not about how many years they've already been coding. It's not about the,
that
they have or about
the recommendations that they could get,
but we want students who don't see themselves in these roles.
That's right.
We say, you know, if you'd like to, you might have the potential and come on board,
they then go through a 15 month rigorous program by which
they're learning software development,
they're learning how to craft their own resumes,
students as young as 14 years old and then
they enter these 8 to 10 week summer internships.
Wow, that's amazing.
So as we mentioned, code to college focuses on underrepresented groups,
especially females and black and brown students.
So why is this important? What is the issue you are trying to address?
So, uh by the time students get to college, about 50% of women,
two thirds of Hispanic students and almost three quarters
of black undergraduate students who elect a STEM major,
either
move to a liberal arts degree or drop out completely. Why is that?
So there are several reasons,
there are psychosocial reasons that have to do with imposter syndrome.
There's also lack of access, there's lack of preparation many of these majors,
if you have not taken the right prerequisite courses in high school,
then you will be counted out.
And so if you didn't even know about these majors or these career paths,
how could you have taken their prerequisite courses?
So what we're saying is we want to give you the technical skills to
be successful as early as possible such that when you get to college,
you are head and shoulders above those affluent peers.
Yeah. OK. And so what new initiatives can we expect from Code to college?
What are y'all working on?
So we just wrapped up our vision 2024 initiative.
Uh So this was focused on supporting developing and placing
200 Black and Latina girls into paid summer internships.
By this year,
we're about to have our largest class of girls placed into internships ever.
And in fact,
it's going to be our first summer where there are more girls that we place than boys.
We're calling it best summer ever. We're excited about that
and this is
our first summer
of our Texas 2000 initiative where we aim to place
2000 Texas high school interns into paid summer internships by summer of 2028.
That is a lofty goal. But one I think you'll be able to, I appreciate,
always good to see you, Matt Stevenson, co founder and CEO of Code to College.
We appreciate your time. Thanks so much for having us back thank you and.