> No, the author claimed that NC A&T was "a damn good one [school]".
> The author was trying to put it on the same level as Duke/UNC in order to paint a picture that the only possible reason for the perfunctory treatment was racism. But NC A&T is not on the same level. "Hooli" is almost certainly elitist, but this anecdote is not good evidence for systemic racism.
Author here. I wasn’t implying that A&T is perceived to be as “prestigious” or highly ranked as Duke. I’m just trying to say that it was certainly worth visiting and worth taking seriously. If you’re looking for black engineers, for whatever reason, it’s reasonable to reach for A&T. Now, you can’t claim a pipeline problem if you’re pretty much ignoring the places where you’re most likely to find your target demographic.
Let’s just drop the words “racism” and other “-isms” since they seem to trigger people and become distracting from the point. What the recruiters did by phoning it in for A&T and focus on Duke was miss out on potentially excellent engineers from A&T and reinforce the demographics found at Duke/UNC. The recruiters made an assumption based on some model they built at Hooli and other companies like it and didn’t do their job, which was to FIND good talent.
I’ve worked at “elite” companies with people from “elite” schools. I’ve also worked with people from no school. There are smart people all over the place, so we don’t need to look at the same 10 schools and ignore the people who didn’t take out a $75k student loan.