[quanpod]

Someone can still be a great engineer and struggle through an early class - there's plenty of reasons for this to happen and universities/colleges need to address these problems.

For example - someone who has never coded before in their life - there shouldn't be some expectation that you had a computer growing up, built a website for peers in middle school and are already an expert by the time you hit your first class. There's plenty of capable people who a) never had the advantages/wealth to support some of these things b) haven't discovered their interest and "weed out" core classes don't help with that. You may take longer to get up to the same place as someone with the advantages above, but that doesn't rule you out from being an effective engineer/computer scientist.

[DougMerritt]

Friends who majored in music theory (not performance, which is worse) tell me that you have to pass a competency test to be admitted into the school as a college freshman.

(At least, at the good schools; this may not be true at third rate schools, I wouldn't know.)

This requires that someone spent years playing an instrument, typically with lots of instruction, both of which are very hard to do with no money.

Some may get this free in high school, but the high school I went to had performance exams to get into those high school freshman classes.

There was no music at all at my junior high.

I got 6 months of instrument training in 6th grade, and that was all that public schools offered me, and I know that some people had even less than that from the schools in their area.

The point being that it's not just computers. If we want to give an equal opportunity to students, there's a tremendous amount that needs fixing that is not at all limited to computers.

[andrepd]

It definitely does need fixing, but not by simply admitting/hiring more minorities until the statistics are agreeable (easy) but by actually making those deep structural changes to enable true equality of opportunity for all (much harder).

[DougMerritt]

Yes; I really dislike adjusting statistics, because it's off-target, whether it's easy or not, but I definitely agree that opportunity is the desirable thing to equalize.

Each racial group has subsets that trend towards different desires; e.g. as a white guy I knew lots of other white guys in high school who were anti-intellectual, and thought that going to college inherently meant you were a snob.

I don't know how to change subgroup attitudes like that, but at any rate it sure would be nice to give opportunity to those who want it.

The primary way that that is hard is that it costs hard money. In my example, money for student instruments and money for music instructors (typically far more than for the instruments, although both are nontrivial).

(In my areas public libraries have been cutting hours (and days) for decades. This is part of the ridiculously negative trend that we, as a society, must stop being foolish about, like these other issues.)

Statistics, OTOH, averages together those who don't want, along with those who do want, which is clearly unfair to those who do want.

[quanpod]

Yes, there's definitely more that needs fixing. My stake in this fight is coming up with things that can happen so my industry (and really, the organizations I work for) can get great talent - and that involves training more & recruiting diverse engineers.

[DougMerritt]

I'm personally concerned about all students, but this sounds interesting:

> coming up with things that can happen...can get great talent

Do you mean things like the famous programs by Intel and Westinghouse or something else?

[shkkmo]

> The point being that it's not just computers. If we want to give an equal opportunity to students, there's a tremendous amount that needs fixing that is not at all limited to computers.

Very, very true.