Google needed to stay competitive, which meant hiring the top graduates of the top math, engineering, and computer science programs in the country—MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley. You could count on two hands, David told me, the number of black and Latino kids in those programs. In fact, according to David, just finding American-born engineers, whatever their race, was getting harder—which was why every company in Silicon Valley had come to rely heavily on foreign students.
