IBM’s $100M investment into Black colleges will be felt across North Carolina
As part of its response to George Floyd’s killing in police custody earlier this year, and a growing reckoning over inequality in business, computer giant IBM plans to invest $100 million in partnerships with historically black colleges across the country.
The plan will benefit several institutions in North Carolina, where IBM has a large presence in both the Research Triangle Park and Charlotte.
The goal of the investment is to grow the kind of computing skills necessary to fill the thousands of unfilled tech jobs in the country, in specialties like cybersecurity and data analytics. To reach that goal IBM is looking to a wider variety of sources for talent, and the investment is, in part, meant to grow that pipeline.
Valinda Kennedy, who works with historically black colleges and universities with the IBM Global University Programs team, said IBM will work with 13 HBCUs at first with a goal of eventually partnering with all 107 of them.
Four colleges in North Carolina, the state with the most HBCU students, will take part in the first round of partnerships: N.C. A&T University, N.C. Central University, Fayetteville State University and Johnson C. Smith University.
Greensboro-based A&T, the largest historically Black university in the country as well as the top producer of Black engineering graduates, will also take part in a separate IBM program focused on quantum computing.
The investments will provide curriculum, software training and digital certifications to Black colleges on topics like cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. It will also give access to computing power that some Black colleges lack that students and faculty can use in research.
“There are some critical jobs that are unfulfilled today. There’s a quote about how there’s 1.8 million cybersecurity jobs that are currently unfulfilled not including the 700,000 people who are retiring in that space,” said Kennedy, who attended West Virginia State, a historically Black institution.
“So instead of keeping talking about that number, we develop academic programs to be able to provide IBM resources for free to higher education, as long as it’s used for teaching, learning and non-commercial research.”
More importantly, the programs could show more Black students that a career in technology is a possibility, said Tim Humphrey, IBM’s top executive in North Carolina and one of the few African-American executives in the Triangle’s technology industry.
Humphrey, who grew up in Fayetteville, said that many young Black individuals, including himself, didn’t grow up knowing any engineers or computer scientists. It wasn’t until a guidance counselor in high school showed him the salaries of engineers that he decided to pursue a STEM education.
“If you don’t see in your community ... engineers, scientists, programmers, (or) data scientists, then you just don’t aspire to be them,” Humphrey said in an interview. “We all know that these roles have great starting salaries, and they have great potential for growth.”
“If we have ability to influence curriculum at HBCUs, where a lot of these students will attend,” he added, “then it gives them an opportunity to think about this as a possible career path. And then once you get in, you start really making money that changes generations, and you start growing your career, and then hopefully you can also be a role model in the community, paying it forward.”
John Gant, the dean of N.C. Central University’s School of Library and Information Sciences, said the donation is important because there is still a huge gap between the corporate investments given to predominantly white institutions and Black ones. He said IBM’s contribution to Central is equal to around $6 million.
“I am amazed at how much of a gap there is and how there has not been a lot of investment to provide these types of resources,” he said. “(Corporate partnerships) are a key tool for building a pipeline and going through the program and then becoming highly employable.”
In a sign that companies might be changing that dynamic, Durham semiconductor maker Cree also recently pledged financial support to N.C. A&T, The News & Observer reported.
Gant said computer-focused courses are growing fast at Durham-based N.C. Central, especially a course focused on cybersecurity. But more importantly, nearly every class taught at the school is using more digital tools.
“The truth of the matter is when you look across our curriculum and every subject we teach, there is rapid adoption of digital tools,” he said in a phone interview. “This partnership with IBM will allow those undergrads to ... to get hands on with latest tools and methodologies being developed at IBM.”
Gant is hopeful that even if students don’t get jobs at IBM after using the company’s resources, they will gain skills that will make them more attractive to other employers in the area.
If the program is successful, it could benefit more companies than just IBM, a fact that is fine with the company, Kennedy said.
“If our clients, some of the largest corporations in the world, know that they can go to these schools (for talent) everybody wins,” she said. “Students get jobs, the clients get the employee base they’re looking for and the school continues to invest in the technologies and business approaches they need to thrive.”
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate
This story was originally published October 2, 2020 at 5:45 AM with the headline "IBM’s $100M investment into Black colleges will be felt across North Carolina."
