Increasing Tech Industry Diversity
Michael Ellison’s CodePath.org helps students from underrepresented backgrounds become top programmers
Michael Ellison came to BU excited to study computer science. But he quickly found himself struggling in his classes, unprepared for their rigor. “Most of the other students in those classes had already programmed before and I had not. I pretty quickly dropped out of the program,” says Ellison (CAS’10). He went on to get a degree in economics, but the experience stuck with him.
Ellison is now working to ensure students around the country don’t have a similar experience. He’s the cofounder and CEO of CodePath.org, a nonprofit that aims to improve computer science education for students from underrepresented and low-income backgrounds and to increase diversity in the tech industry. Partnering with more than 60 colleges and universities, CodePath offers supplemental computer science courses, mentorship, 24/7 support, and career prep—all free of charge.
I had this thought: ‘I’m going to change the world’…. When you feel like the odds are stacked against you, then you want to do anything you can in order to give yourself the chance to make it to the top.
Its mission is deeply personal to Ellison. He grew up in rural Maine and there were times when he and his family were homeless. “When you’re that young, you don’t really know what’s going on. I just knew my mom was trying to take care of us,” he says. “I think growing up low income actually gave me a lot of perspective, made me really empathetic, made me really connect with any people who also came from disadvantaged backgrounds.”
It also drove him to dream big.
“When I got to high school, I had this thought: ‘I’m going to change the world.’ I continued to think that when I got to BU.”
That impulse to have an impact inspired Ellison’s entrepreneurial spirit, though he prefers not to call it that. “I think of it more like a survival instinct,” says Ellison. “Because when you feel like the odds are stacked against you, then you want to do anything you can in order to give yourself the chance to make it to the top.”
He founded his first company, Base, as a 19-year-old CAS sophomore. Base was a nonprofit focused on helping low-income students at risk of dropping out of high school turn their grades around and attend competitive four-year colleges. He took some time off from BU to grow the organization, but returned five years later to finish his degree.
After graduating, he cofounded other companies, including Segment, a customer data management business that was recently acquired by Twilio, a cloud communications platform, for $3.2 billion.
In 2013, he cofounded a for-profit iteration of CodePath with Nathan Esquenazi and Tim Lee, which provided accelerated software development classes to senior engineers at companies like Google and Facebook. In 2017, they shifted to the nonprofit CodePath.org. Its introductory courses provide a foundation to coding and are targeted to students who, like Ellison, never had experience with programming before entering college. All courses are developed in conjunction with top technology companies to ensure that students are career-ready upon graduation.
“We’re really focused on fundamentally changing what is being taught in computer science classrooms all over the country and how it’s being taught,” by tailoring the curriculum to the individual student, says Ellison, “and on the systemwide impact that we can make on the education-to-employment pipeline.”