To Solve the Diversity Drought in Software Engineering, Look to Community Colleges (vice.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Community college is not flashy and does not make promises about your future employability. You will also likely not learn current way-cool web development technologies like React and GraphQL. In terms of projects, you're more likely to build software for organizing a professor's DVD or textbook collection than you are responsive web apps. I would tell you that all of this is OK because in community college computer science classes you're learning fundamentals, broad concepts like data structures, algorithmic complexity, and object-oriented programming. You won't learn any of those things as deeply as you would in a full-on university computer science program, but you'll get pretty far. And community college is cheap, though that varies depending on where you are. Here in Portland, OR, the local community college network charges $104 per credit. Which means it's possible to get a solid few semesters of computer science coursework down for a couple of grand. Which is actually amazing. In a new piece published in the Communications of the ACM, Silicon Valley researchers Louise Ann Lyon and Jill Denner make the argument that community colleges have the potential to play a key role in increasing equity and inclusion in computer science education. If you haven't heard, software engineering has a diversity problem. Access to education is a huge contributor to that, and Denner and Lyon see community college as something of a solution in plain sight.

Comments

Not $104 per credit. For most in Oregon, it's free

[StevenMaurer]

Here in Portland, OR, the local community college network charges $104 per credit.

Thanks entirely to the Democratic ownership of the state legislature and the governorship, Oregon promises free community college for any legal state resident starting out college from highschool (or GED), who isn't a trust fund baby, and has at least a 2.5 GPA, via the Oregon Promise Grant. You do have to file out some forms, but then you're golden.

You must meet all of the following criteria:

• Complete an Oregon Promise Grant Application by the appropriate deadline
• File a FAFSA or ORSAA application and list at least one Oregon community college
• Be a recent Oregon high school graduate or GED recipient
• Document a 2.5 cumulative high school GPA or higher; or a GED score of 145 or higher on each test
• Plan to attend at least half-time at an Oregon community college within 6 months of high school graduation or GED completion
• Be an Oregon resident for at least 12 months prior to college attendance
• Must not have more than 90 college credits completed or attempted
• Beginning with Fall 2017 applicants, students may be subject to eligibility criteria based on their Expected Family Contribution (EFC). The EFC limit for 2017-18 applicants is $18,000. New applicants who are above the EFC limit will not be eligible for an award. The EFC criteria is subject to change.

There are plenty of web development classes as well.

Re:Does diversity results in better code?

[AlanBDee]

The best developer on my team is a girl from Vietnam. My experience has been that diversity is a good thing, but I'm not convinced that there is a "diversity problem". We're so desperate to find competent developers that we couldn't be discriminatory if we wanted to be.