Facebook invested $4.2 million to expand Northeastern University's computer science graduate program that helps people from other fields get into technology.
The investment will also help expand the program to other universities. The Program alignment focuses on the representation of women and minorities in technology and helps people without computer science training or technology experience enter the field. Facebook's investment will fund eight hours of classes for 200 students.
Northeastern's Align program began in 2013 and currently has 575 students enrolled at Northeastern locations in Seattle, Boston, Silicon Valley, San Francisco and Charlotte. The program was launched with seed funding from Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation firm created by Melinda Gates. and corporate partners, such as Dell Technologies, which funded scholarships for students.
As part of the investment, three other universities — Columbia University, Georgia Tech and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — will use best practices from Northeastern to create “pathways” into their graduate computer science programs for non-tech people. Facebook and Northeastern want to create a consortium of at least 15 US colleges and universities within four years that will focus on increasing diversity in computer science.
“Partnering with Facebook allows us to develop a path, scaling it not only here at Northeastern but to other top computer science schools that are passionate about diversity – of thought, race, gender and background,” said Carla Brodley, dean of Northeastern's Khoury College of Computer Sciences, in a statement.
