“as if”. Those are your words, not mine. There are probably no ways for me to win the argument here, but I’ll just state the facts.
I think it was a net positive for Google to specifically recruit calibrated interviewers to do campus interviews at HBCUs for very young first year students. I volunteered because I wanted to help. I don’t have any other data points as I didn’t do campus recruiting elsewhere.
The recruiters were very clear in our preparation. Unlike students from other universities where the kids may have been programming since they were young, the students at HBCUs may have just completed their very first programming courses. This is an issue of societal demographics, not quality of education.
It IS a problem at other universities, where programming whiz kids are crowding out normal students who may want to learn Computer Science without prior experience. HBCUs and all women's schools actually do a better job at leveling the STEM playing field.
The HBCU interview trip was in 2017. I went to Xavier University in New Orleans. I did five back to back interviews. Some of the kids were very inexperienced, but with hints they were able to implement a for loop. One clearly had more experience and was able to implement a binary search. Of the five, I definitely remember two of them joining as summer interns, maybe three. That’s 40% to 60% success rate. Better than most.
I haven’t followed up on them since their summer internship in 2018, but I hope they are doing well in their careers. If that internship motivated them to finish their CS degrees and got them into the tech field, then I’ve done my job.