Free STEM education programs offer non-college route to tech jobs

Olivia Sanchez
| The Hechinger Report

BROOKLYN, NY − Nearly two years ago, Isaiah Hickerson woke up in the middle of the night from a dream in which he thought he was a programmer.

The dream was completely random; he knew nothing about coding. He had a job answering the phone in the grooming department of a PetSmart in Miami. After work, he was trying to figure out what to do with his life. At 23, he had taken a few classes in business and biology at a community college. He was lukewarm on both counts.

“I just felt empty,” Hickerson said. “I wanted to do something else, but I just didn’t know what. I didn’t have any passion for anything. And I didn’t know what passion felt like.”

He knows it sounds far-fetched, but the dream changed him. Moments after he woke up, he was online, trying to figure out what it meant.

“I literally got up right away, 2 in the morning, probably 2:05,” he said. “I remember the whole timeline, because this is what changed — my dream is what got me here.”

By “here,” Hickerson means the Marcy Lab School in Brooklyn, New York, where he’s nearing the end of a one-year software engineering fellowship program. It’s not a college or a fancy tech boot camp, but a nonprofit, tuition-free program designed to help students from historically underrepresented communities − like Hickerson, who is black − get good-paying jobs in tech.

Colleges and universities across the country offer dozens of programs to help students from underrepresented groups succeed in STEM education. Much less common are independent nonprofits that focus on students who don’t have the resources to attend college, don’t want to attend college, or don’t believe they can succeed in a STEM program. These nonprofits offer free, short-term training programs and help with job placement.

Two prominent examples, on the other side of the coast, are the Marcy Lab School and Hack the Hood, in Oakland, California. Hack the Hood offers 12-week data science training programs and recently partnered with Laney College, a community college in Oakland, to offer students a certificate of achievement in data science.

Data from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics shows that Black and Hispanic people are disproportionately less likely to earn bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering, are underrepresented in the STEM workforce, and earn lower salaries in those jobs than their white and Asian peers.

Achieving better representation means providing students with the academic and financial aid they need. The financial resources required to pursue a four-year STEM degree, or even a two-year degree, can be prohibitively expensive. Opening up shortcuts that are free or less expensive than for-profit bootcamps can help. Programs designed for these students give them the training they need to compete for STEM jobs with salaries that can lead to economic and social mobility. Both the Marcy Lab School and Hack the Hood are nonprofits funded by donations from philanthropic groups.

These programs are valuable if they help people get a step further than they would have gotten without the training, said Weverton Ataide Pinheiro, an assistant professor in the College of Education at Texas Tech University. “We know that they can’t compete unless they have some kind of training, and they may not be able to pay for it,” he said.

Reuben Ogbonna, one of the co-founders of the Marcy Lab School, said his team has partnered with technology companies to ensure that Marcy students can find jobs as software developers after graduating, and can qualify for positions that normally require a bachelor’s degree.

Since the school opened in 2019, about 200 students have completed the program. In the first three years, about 80% graduated, and about 90% of graduates got jobs in STEM, with an average salary of $105,000 a year, Ogbonna said. But in the past two years, during what Ogbonna called a tech recession, jobs have been harder to find; this year, six months after graduation, about 60% of the graduates had jobs, he said.

But by attending Marcy instead of a four-year university, students get three extra years to earn money, build their savings and accumulate wealth, Ogbonna said. And they don’t have to pay off loans.

“We’re trying to reverse a very large problem that’s existed for a long time,” he said. “If we can provide wealth to our students earlier, that can be exponentially (later) for the communities that we serve.”

Hack the Hood, which serves students ages 16 to 25, teaches racial equity and social justice in addition to its technical curriculum, said Samia Zuber, executive director. These components of the program help students confront issues like imposter syndrome when they enter the workplace, Zuber said, and think critically about the work they do. For example, they teach students about racial bias in facial recognition software and the implications that can have.

“It really opens your eyes and makes you want to change it,” student Lizbet Roblero Arreola said of the misuse of facial recognition data. “For me personally, I want to be someone in those companies that doesn’t let that happen.”

For Roblero Arreola, a 24-year-old first-generation Mexican American, going to college was never a given. When she became pregnant with her first child shortly after graduating from high school, she decided to continue working in customer service. Last year, after the birth of her second child, she saw a friend posting online about Hack the Hood. She had been thinking about going back to school, and it seemed like Hack the Hood would ease her transition.

Arreola said the Hack the Hood team helped her with the steps needed to enroll at Laney College, including how to apply for financial aid. After she completes her associate’s degree in computer programming at Laney, she hopes to transfer to a four-year college and earn a bachelor’s degree. Eventually, she wants to pursue a career in the cybersecurity industry.

These programs are also designed for students like Nicole Blanchette, an 18-year-old from a rural Connecticut community who chose the Marcy Lab School over a traditional college education.

Blanchette’s father has an associate’s degree, and her mother, who is Filipino, did not pursue a postsecondary education. Blanchette became intrigued by a career in tech during her senior year of high school, but she hesitated, she said, because “the stereotypical computer science student doesn’t look like me.”

But an ad for Marcy Lab made her think that a career in tech was possible. She did the math and figured out that living in New York for a year would be cheaper than going to any of the colleges she had been accepted to, even with financial aid. She convinced her parents to put the money they had saved for her education toward her living expenses while she went to Marcy.

Ogbonna and Marcy Lab’s other co-founder, Maya Bhattacharjee-Marcantonio, both started as teachers, recruiting the first class of Marcy students from their personal networks and local community organizations. Now, about 30% to 40% of Marcy Lab’s students come straight from high school.

For Hickerson, who first thought about programming after that vivid dream, the idea of not knowing what passion felt like is a distant memory. Now, when he talks about what he’s learning and the career he hopes to build in software engineering, he never seems to stop smiling.

This story about STEM education programs was produced by The Hechinger Reportan independent non-profit organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.