Google announced 100,000 scholarships and online certificate programs. It will also award over $10 million in grants to nonprofit organizations.
The Google scholarships 100,000 are need-based and offered to individuals enrolled in any of the tech giant’s career certificate programs.
The three new online certificate programs of Google are in data analytics, project management, and user experience design.
These fields were chosen because they can lead to “high-growth, high-paying careers.”
Google employees will be providing and teaching the certificates. Future students do not need to have a college degree to participate in the programs. They can complete the programs in three to six months and take them through the online learning platform Coursera.
According to Google, it will treat all of its certificates as the equivalent of a four-year college degree for relevant roles at the company.
“This is not revenue-generating for Google,” says Google vice president, Lisa Gevelber, who manages Grow with Google and Google for Startups and serves as the company’s Americas chief marketing officer. “There’s a small cost from the Coursera platform itself — the current pricing is $49 a month — but we want to ensure that anyone who wants to have this opportunity, can have it.”
Google will also award over $10 million in grants to YWCA, NPower and JFF. These are nonprofit groups that work with Google to offer workforce development to women, veterans, and underrepresented Americans.
Unemployment rate
The launch of Google scholarships comes as the US faces historically high unemployment levels. The US Labor Department reported that 33 million people were claiming unemployment benefits as of June 20. This is five times the high of 6.6 million affected during the Great Recession.
The coronavirus pandemic presents uncertainty to certain jobs that may not return immediately due to different reasons, such as cost-cutting measures, business closure, and automation.
Coronavirus “has caused an acceleration of some labor trends like automation,” said Karen Fichuk, CEO of Randstad North America during an interview on CNBC Make It in April. She noted that out-of-work Americans may need to gain new skills in order to get new jobs.
“What we’re seeing is this significant need for massive up-skilling and retraining, especially for workers who have been laid off,” she added.
With this, low-cost certificate programs are deemed as a possible solution, as well as an instrument to fight historic inequality in fields such as tech and improve prospects for those who have not graduated in college.
“While college degrees have tons of value, they are not accessible to everyone,” says Gevelber. “And we believe that the absence of a college degree should not be a barrier to economic stability.”
Google introduced a similar certificate program for those interested in IT in 2018.
“When we first built the IT certificate, we built it for our own use,” says Gevelber. “We wanted to diversify our own workforce and we knew to do that we needed to create an on-ramp for underrepresented and ‘nontraditional applicants.’ We thought a certificate would be a way to accomplish that goal, and it did.”
Online learning
According to Google, 58% of those who take its IT certificate are Latino, Black, female or as a veteran and that 45% of enrollees earn less than $30,000 per year. The company also says that 80% of their students say the program allowed them to improve their job search or career within six months. These improvements include getting a salary raise, finding a new job, or setting up a new business.
Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera, says over 250,000 participants have taken Google’s IT certificate, 57% of whom do not hold a college degree, making it the platform’s most popular certificate. He believes the new certificates will also be attractive to people especially that everyone is forced to stay home.
Maggioncalda adds the coronavirus pandemic has shaped “unprecedented demand” for online courses.
“There’s a course from Yale on the science of wellbeing that saw 2 million enrollments just in 2020 alone,” he says. “We have a course that was launched in May from John Hopkins called ‘COVID Contact Tracing.’ Within four weeks, it had 400,000 enrollments.”
“The college degree requirement excludes lots of people who could do the job if only they had a different way of getting the skills. Online learning is a necessary, but not sufficient, ingredient to creating more social equity,” he says. “Our ‘new normal’ where I can get skilled to do a job without leaving my community, and I can get the job and do the job and get paid for doing the job without leaving my community, I believe that this will create more economic opportunity than anything we’ve seen before.”
