Google announced today that Howard University will open a campus at the Googleplex in Mountain View this summer, where computer science students from the historically black university will have the option of studying for three months at a time.
There’s going to be a Howard University campus at Google
But the company won’t cover all of the students’ costs.
This is a networking opportunity for students, whose instructors will include Google engineers in addition to Howard faculty. Students will also have access to amenities including the famed employee cafeterias at Google’s corporate headquarters.
What this is not: An internship, or a job. Google is not paying the students. A company spokesperson said the university will provide students with a stipend to cover housing and other costs. Students will receive academic credit.
By comparison, internships at Google come with a salary of $6,600 a month, plus a monthly housing stipend of $3,000, according to a poll conducted by a Purdue University undergraduate. Rent out here is steep! (Asked to confirm numbers, Google said it doesn’t release compensation data.)
Google has stated a commitment to hiring more diverse candidates, announcing in 2015 it would spend $150 million on outside organizations and internal programs aimed at making the company more inclusive.
Google is still overwhelmingly white. Black employees account for only 2 percent of its workforce, compared with 59 percent for white and 32 percent Asian, according to Google’s latest diversity report.
The new program with Howard University is expected to start with 25-30 students this summer with plans to expand eventually to include 750 students from a longer list of historically black colleges and universities.
It’s not clear whether the program will offer students formal special access to job or internship opportunities with Google.
In a blog post about the new campus, Google’s vice president in charge of global partnerships Bonita Stewart said the new campus “is now the centerpiece of Google’s effort to recruit more black software engineers from Historically Black Colleges and Universities — and to make them feel right at home here in Mountain View.”
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
