Billionaire Robert Smith Pushes Plan to Boost Minority Students’ Access to Internships

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Robert Smith made waves Sunday when he pledged to wipe out the student debt of nearly 400 Morehouse College graduates, but the billionaire has even bigger goals to help African-American students, including a plan to help thousands nationwide get that first crucial work experience that can open the door to a meaningful career.

The Fund II Foundation, which Smith had a key role in creating, is hoping to get thousands of students involved in internX. The new program centers on an internet site where students studying science, technology, engineering, or math can connect with companies looking to ensure their interns are drawn from a diverse pool of students.

Too often students of color are overlooked when companies hire summer interns, says Linda Wilson, the foundation’s executive director. Companies will take on “summer hires” of children of board members or executives without regard to their qualifications, she says, but won’t consider a student from a historically black college or who lives in a different neighborhood.

The result is that many technology students are left out of a key phase in developing a career, where they can learn specific skills, build their network of peers and mentors, and determine if they are on the right professional path, Wilson says.

“Internships can make or break you,” she says.

It’s a point Smith himself knows well. As a high-school student and budding computer whiz, he called the human-resources director for a Bell Labs facility repeatedly until she relented and gave him an internship usually reserved for students who had completed their junior year of college.

Smith has said his time at Bell Labs helped him develop his critical thinking skills and placed him in a working environment alongside people with Ph.D.s in physics that he would not have normally had access to. He went on to pursue a career in chemical engineering and then made a fortune as an investor through his private-equity fund Vista Equity Partners. Forbes pegs his net worth at $5 billion.

Helping 10,000 Students

Fund II Foundation was created in 2014 when, in effect, some of the investment gains of Smith’s Vista Equity Partners Fund II were set aside for charity. Smith serves as president and founding director of the foundation, which reported $105 million in assets and made nearly $18 million in grants in 2017, the most recent year for which figures are available.

Apart from the independently operated Fund II, Smith also engages in his own personal philanthropy, such as his gift to the Morehouse students.

Fund II Foundation supports the preservation of African-American culture, human rights, music education, the environment and outdoor programs, and programs that promote entrepreneurship and innovation.

Students with at least a 2.8 grade-point average can upload their resumes on the internX site and are given a skills assessment. Fund II is in the process of putting together a system to prepare students for interviews, improve technical skills, and fine-tune their resumes.

The foundation sends text reminders to students who haven’t completed the form or to remind them about upcoming interviews. Wilson said she is putting together a team of her own interns who will work in a call center to do those same reminders on the phone.

The foundation would like to place 1,000 students this year, and 10,000 by 2020. So far, 86 companies, including AT&T and PricewaterhouseCoopers, have signed on to participate. The foundation has put $3 million toward the creation of internX. Wilson says the foundation is prepared to spend more to increase training available to participating students, and broaden the site’s reach.

“I’m not going to say it’s limitless,” she says. “But we’re going to make sure it works.”

Diversity in a Database

The goal is to build a pipeline of qualified, vetted students. Too often, Wilson says, companies complain that they want more black and Hispanic interns but they can’t find top-notch candidates. The promise of internX is that companies will gain free access to a database of thousands of applicants.

“Everyone says they want diversity. The business case has been around for 40 years,” Wilson says. “We want it to be institutionalized. The time is ripe to do this en masse.”

Patrick Cohen, vice president for strategic partnerships at Fund II grantee NPower, a group that trains young adults and military veterans in computer programming and network security, says companies often build internal “pathways” programs to build their own pipelines of qualified students of color. The introduction of internX, he says, centralizes what has been a disjointed process.

Cohen sees similarities between the internship site and Smith’s erasure of the Morehouse graduates’ debt. Even with a college degree, graduates can be weighed down by loan payments, resulting in minimal savings and investment rates. Similarly, college graduates without significant work experience can’t fully take advantage of the benefits of the degree they’ve earned.

“It’s a recurring cycle that sort of defeats the purpose of college,” he says.

Changing Lives

Ruth Rathblott, president of the Harlem Educational Activities Fund, is encouraging the 140 college students who participate in the after-school program to look into internX. Employers who want to diversify their work force will make a “beeline” to the site, she predicts. And student resumes will be treated with care, rather than as just a random application.

An internship can change a student’s life, she says: “The doors open. It opens our students up to new opportunities, businesses, and workplaces they didn’t know existed.”

The technology field suffers from a greater lack of diversity than the overall private work force in the United States, according to a 2016 study by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The commission found that the tech work force was 7 percent black; the overall work force is 14 percent of black. Hispanics filled 8 percent of the tech positions and nearly 14 percent of the broader work force.

The report suggests there is some credence to the “pipeline” theory that schools are not producing enough technology graduates who are black or Hispanic to fill more positions. But additional factors are at play.

About 9 percent of graduates of the top computer-science programs are from underrepresented minority groups, but only 5 percent of employees at large tech firms are from those populations.

Wilson says the reason is simple.

“If your contact list is only your neighbors or people who look like you, that’s who you’ll call.”