Meta will soon bring in the last cohort of students at Meta University, its diversity-focused training program that had been a model for the industry. The program’s impending closure is part of a larger shift away from diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts among tech giants, and other companies that began amid backlash a couple years ago and has intensified since Donald Trump returned to office in January.

The Big Idea: Meta employees and advocates for diversity in tech say Meta University’s closure could stymie any progress that had been made in recent years on diversifying tech pipelines. It also marks a bigger change in the landscape of tech hiring in which there are fewer entry-level jobs and advances in AI are creating new roles and changing others.

The program has focused on recruiting students from four-year colleges and universities with large, diverse populations that don’t typically send graduates to Big Tech companies.  

“By losing Meta University, we lose access to talent that isn’t Ivy League, that isn’t your top-tier colleges,” says Ernesto Flores, who worked as a recruiter at Meta from 2017-2022 and recruited at HBCUs and Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) for Meta University. “What this program did was really build the confidence, the necessary skill set, and the tools needed to be able to excel and thrive in these tech environments that are very fast-paced.”

Tracy Clayton, a spokesperson for Meta, confirmed that Meta University has accepted its final class. The wind-down was not sudden. Within the last year, language on the website changed from targeting “students from underrepresented communities” to “students with a range of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives.” Then on Jan. 10, Meta sent out a memo indicating the closure of the training program.

In February, Denise Hernandez, a program manager at Meta who created the original Facebook University (later renamed Meta University), described the program as “transformative” in a LinkedIn post.

“It opened the doors for students who may have doubted their worth or ability to thrive in tech,” Hernandez wrote. “It proved that equity is the foundation of true opportunity.”

Flores, who later worked as a lead program manager at Nvidia, says he viewed Meta as a leader in DEI-focused tech training programs. When he started working at Meta (then Facebook), he added, there was a real ethos around hiring diverse talent to hear different perspectives on how to improve the company’s products worldwide. Meta University was “the main program bringing in diverse talent.”

Unlike many traditional tech internship programs that start in the latter half of an undergraduate’s enrollment, Meta University was for freshmen and sophomores. The 10-week program helped them get accustomed to working at Meta and get up to speed on skills. Meta mentors could even advise students on what classes to take when they returned to campus to make them more competitive. All of this helped prepare them for internships in their junior or senior years, which most of them went on to land. 

“You don’t just hire underrepresented talent,” Flores says. “You have to build infrastructure internally to keep the talent and develop the talent and not just get them in the door. That’s one thing that I think many companies miss.”

A Larger Shift

Aside from Meta University, Amazon and Google have rolled back DEI-focused training programs. Kirsten Lundgren, director of economic and workforce initiatives at the Kapor Center, says the closure of these programs is the latest blow to tech training programs that aimed to diversify the workforce.

“For early talent pipelines, the closure of these programs is problematic, but also the halt in hiring talent because of AI shifts and automation shifts,” Lundgren says. “It creates a lot of challenges for early talent, and this is just yet another obstacle.”

While training programs like Meta University have created much-needed pathways for underrepresented populations to enter the lucrative tech workforce, they have hardly solved the problem. 

  • Between 2014 and 2021, Black representation in technical roles in the tech industry increased only by 1%, according to a Kapor Center report.
  • Furthermore, Black workers were paid 4% less than their peers and often hired in lower-level roles despite their qualifications.
  • And a similar report looking at the Latino population in the tech workforce showed that while 1 in 5 workers in the U.S. is Latino, only 1 in 10 tech workers is.

Lili Gangas, chief technology community officer at the Kapor Center, says she and her colleagues are looking at other ways to help people from underrepresented groups make their way into good tech jobs. As an example, she cited a new initiative in California, where the Kapor Center is based, in which Nvidia is partnering with community colleges to train students and workers on new tech skills. 

“It might actually be an interesting opportunity to bring in not just your for-profit companies, but perhaps some of these large nonprofits or perhaps looking at the public sector,” Gangas says.

Thinking Differently About Opportunity

Jehron Petty, founder and CEO of ColorStack, a nonprofit that provides a support network for Black and Latino computer science students, says his organization has had informal partnerships with Meta University and other Big Tech training programs, like Microsoft Explore and Google STEP. He was surprised to learn that Meta University was shutting down completely rather than just changing the language around DEI.

“A lot of our students spoke very highly of the program as a really strong developmental experience,” Petty says. “A lot of them have said over the years that they got a little bit more autonomy in that program. They were pushed a little bit harder. It was definitely one of the flagship programs for underrepresented computer science students.”

As a computer science student at Cornell University nearly a decade ago, Petty says he saw the divide between students who arrived at the intro to computer science class with coding experience and those who didn’t. He saw programs like Meta University as “equalizers” as they helped students catch up early on in their college careers and put them on the path to getting the coveted junior year internship. 

Looking Forward: But even before Trump was elected last year, Petty had been encouraging students in ColorStack to think of alternative pathways to good jobs in tech. Given the depletion of entry-level jobs and the rise of AI, he has encouraged students to become entrepreneurs and perhaps even forego the internship completely. 

“Don’t wait for an internship. Don’t wait for a job,” Petty says he counsels students. “Just find problems around you and solve them and hopefully you can build a business out of it. At a minimum, you build your skills and make yourself more employable.”