I am a non-minority, CS graduate of a HBCU. There were amazing hackers in my program. I believe there were around 200-300 declared CS majors across all levels when I graduated. Numbers are down from those peaks now.
My institution was heavily recruited by big corps, government labs, and east coast companies.
The "best" students, by GPA, were in high-demand for all of the above. Many were heavily recruited into management tracks for non-IT companies. A large number of government institutions and defense contractors were also eager to land new grads from our school. The "best" students, by hacking skills were (maybe stereo-typically for hackers) less interested in classes that didn't involve slinging code, but also all landed programming gigs. Less committed students, from either metric, seemed to still be getting jobs but I can't generalize as to the job type.
I think it is fair to say that my undergrad course-work was not as demanding as (guessing a bit here) Stanford, MIT, or CMU. But my GPA and GRE scores landed me multiple job and graduate school offers.
One aspect of hiring from (or at least my) HBCUs is that there is very strong network effect - alumni come back to the school and recruit interns and fulltime positions for their companies, help prep students for the process, and students looked to those alumni as trusted sources.
If Silicon Valley really wants to hire from HBCUs, that is the path I would recommend. Hire a few alums from the HBCUs and make recruiting and grooming candidates a priority for those alums.
My institution was heavily recruited by big corps, government labs, and east coast companies.
The "best" students, by GPA, were in high-demand for all of the above. Many were heavily recruited into management tracks for non-IT companies. A large number of government institutions and defense contractors were also eager to land new grads from our school. The "best" students, by hacking skills were (maybe stereo-typically for hackers) less interested in classes that didn't involve slinging code, but also all landed programming gigs. Less committed students, from either metric, seemed to still be getting jobs but I can't generalize as to the job type.
I think it is fair to say that my undergrad course-work was not as demanding as (guessing a bit here) Stanford, MIT, or CMU. But my GPA and GRE scores landed me multiple job and graduate school offers.
One aspect of hiring from (or at least my) HBCUs is that there is very strong network effect - alumni come back to the school and recruit interns and fulltime positions for their companies, help prep students for the process, and students looked to those alumni as trusted sources.
If Silicon Valley really wants to hire from HBCUs, that is the path I would recommend. Hire a few alums from the HBCUs and make recruiting and grooming candidates a priority for those alums.