"Just go to your school and join a club. It's not that hard," said a corporate employer in response to my question, "Do you have any tips for us to better prepare students that do not have as competitive of resumes?" It may seem like a plausible answer to this seemingly simple question; however, it was one of the first glaring examples of inequity that I observed during my time doing research in Buffalo.
My research project has centered on equity in internships, particularly racial equity in hiring practices by corporations. The Buffalo Public Schools system is 80% students of color, while the corporate workforce is 9% people of color. Since people tend to hire those who look like them, time and time again BPS graduates are systemically shut out from workforce development opportunities, especially in the corporate sector.
Many of these BPS graduates are also first-generation college students, individuals with low-incomes, and English language learners. With these marginalized identities, it is incredibly difficult to compete with the rest of the applicant pool who often have personal connections to employers, transformative experiences, and more already under their belts and on their resumes. The mission of the Say Yes Internship and Career Pathways Program is to provide additional support and give students these essential career-building opportunities. However, Say Yes only has so much power and as hiring is out of their hands, the outcome is typically far from equitable.
How can we expect students who have to balance college, family, and multiple part times jobs to also have an immense amount of career experience and extracurricular involvement? Isn't that what an internship is for...gaining experience? Why do applicants have to have a particular major...isn't an internship for career exploration? Why do you have to interview students 3+ times for an eight-week job? Why does a simple grammatical error completely disqualify a student? Not to mention that the whole construct of professionalism and its expectations were designed so that only the white and wealthy would succeed. Further, why espouse values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, yet make no efforts to equitably hire diverse talent? How do you expect these students to "pull themselves up by the bootstraps" when they work their butts off and you don't even give them a chance!?
So how do we teach these corporations to care? How do we teach them to practice equity with the same energy that they promote it? I wish I knew the answer. I don't think that any amount of racial equity or sensitivity training will fix the problem. We need a massive redistribution of power. But until then, I truly think that organizations who truly practice equity are already benefiting from its competitive advantage. Instituting equitable practices is actually...not that hard.