Bay Area tech titans go big on education
Private firms join in $300 million pledge
The White House on Monday announced plans to spend $200 million a year on grants meant to boost science, tech, engineering and math education in an effort to close a widening skills gap that, some say, has left Americans out of the running for scientific and technical jobs.
Bay Area powerhouses Facebook, Google and Salesforce have committed $50 million apiece to support these efforts — making up about half the $300 million commitment from the private sector.
It was not immediately clear where the $200 million in federal dollars would come from, though the Trump administration emphasized that it would not be new funding, but rather existing money that would be redirected.
For tech companies like Salesforce, however, the monetary commitment is a new one.
Salesforce — whose philanthropic arm, Salesforce.org, also committed 1 million employee volunteer hours over the next five years
to expand K-12 computer science education in the U.S. — has contributed $65 million to school districts since 1999.
The additional commitment would broaden the company’s efforts, a spokeswoman said Tuesday, not replace them.
“Nothing is more important than educating our nation’s students and preparing them for the jobs of tomorrow,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement Tuesday. “Through our longstanding partnerships with San Francisco Bay Area school districts, we’ve seen a big impact from our investments — not only in dollars, but employee time and expertise. I encourage every CEO, every organization and every individual to contribute to educating our youth and providing them access to computer science skills.”
Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and senior adviser, has been a driving force behind the push for greater technical education initiatives — especially for girls, who have also been the target of numerous Silicon Valley programs aimed at increasing the number of women in tech.
The funneling of federal funds into education and technical skills is nothing new.
President Barack Obama had made such education — called STEM for science, technology, engineering and math — a priority for his administration and pledged in 2011 to prepare 100,000 new math and science teachers by 2021 and secure $1 billion in private investments to further it.
Race to the Top, a competitive grant program created by the Obama administration, has awarded hundreds of millions of dollars to low-performing schools aiming to improve and emphasize technical education.
The Trump administration inherited other similarly focused grant programs like the Minority Science and Engineering Improvement Program, which awards colleges and universities money to “increase the flow of underrepresented ethnic minorities, particularly minority women, into science and engineering careers.”
Over the summer, Ivanka Trump reportedly began seeking input on technical education and ways to improve it from Silicon Valley executives including Apple CEO Tim Cook, who has directly asked the president to require coding classes in American public schools, and Laurene Powell Jobs, who chairs the board of XQ: The Super School Project, a nonprofit aimed at “rethinking” how high school works.
Though Apple is not among the companies pledging financial backing for the Trump administration’s new effort, the company offered praise to the administration’s initiative.
Several experts said giving schools money to support these kinds of programs is an effective way to create lasting change.
“With the impending explosion of new 5G technologies, the Internet of Things, and other innovations like autonomous vehicles, the U.S. must ramp up investments to ensure that the youth of today are prepared to innovate for our economy tomorrow,” Tom Ferree, CEO of Connected Nation Inc., a nonprofit that promotes Internet access and tech literacy for all, said in an email Tuesday. “We applaud the White House for prioritizing STEM education — and coding specifically — to ensure that the U.S. continues to lead the world in building a more connected society.”
In July, the president announced that he was donating his salary for the second quarter of the year to the Department of Education. The $100,000 donation from Trump will be used to help fund a camp for students to explore science and math careers. But the announcement was met with anger by some education advocates, who found the charitable donation insulting while Trump was also seeking a $9 billion cut to the agency in his budget request.