Angel Rivera loves Microsoft Corp., but not just for its technology.
The 22-year-old Chicago native credits the blue-chip software company and DePaul University with turning his life around.
Rivera was 15 when he dropped out of high school. “No one could tell me anything,” he said.
He spent a year “relaxing and having fun” in Florida and returned to Chicago with limited job options. He landed work as a grocery clerk. “I hated it,” Rivera said.
Eager to better himself but lacking money for education, Rivera enrolled in DePaul’s accelerated e-business certificate program. The full-time, 12-week tech boot camp housed in the university’s Egan Urban Center is designed for young adults 17 to 25 who are in danger of wasting their talent. Students are referred by community organizations that have spotted their potential and determination.
About 50 students have completed the tuition-free program since it started in 2000 with partial support from a $1.5 million federal education grant. But the federal grant expires at the end of the month.
Rivera and DePaul educators are crossing their fingers that the Bush administration will approve a third year of funding or that the private sector will join Microsoft in stepping forward to help.
Without full financial support, the program will end. Yet in academic terms, it is a resounding success: Two-thirds of graduates were placed in tech jobs and the remaining one-third enrolled in colleges or advanced tech certification programs. Nearly all of the participants are either black or Hispanic, and half are female.
“A year and a half ago, I never thought about technology because I couldn’t,” said Rivera, who now manages a community technology center in Humboldt Park that provides free computer training to neighborhood residents. “It was a part of the world, just not mine.”
While DePaul University is the program’s largest backer, Microsoft runs a close second, said Bruce Montgomery, technology strategist and systems administrator for the Egan Center.
Microsoft has donated all of the software used by the class, and most of it compatible with Microsoft’s new .NET technology. It also has given a substantial amount of employees’ time to mentor students and to teach instructors Microsoft’s programming platform so that they in turn can explain it to students.
Microsoft’s philanthropy has detractors, however.
Critics say the company’s generosity to community groups and schools is a ploy to build market share and gives the software giant a competitive edge in the school computing market. A federal judge in January rejected Microsoft’s proposal to donate computers and software to public schools to settle a private class-action lawsuit.
Microsoft valued the donation at $1 billion and was opposed by rival Apple Computer Inc. and some educators who said the donation would help Microsoft gain leverage in the school market.
Still, Microsoft keeps giving.
The company said it donated $4.1 million last year to Chicago-area community and human service organizations and educational institutions. It said it followed up in February with a $2.6 million software donation to the Chicago IT Resource Center. The software reached 300 area not-for-profit organizations and 25 community technology centers like the one where Rivera works.
Montgomery said he was delighted that DePaul’s program was among those on the receiving end, and that he’ll happily train people to use Microsoft products if doing so means more success stories like Rivera’s.
It wasn’t so much what the company gave, but how it gave it that earned DePaul’s respect, Montgomery said. Microsoft invested only after one of its Chicago consultants, Ken Spann, checked out the program and spent time with the students. Spann, who grew up on the city’s South Side, is one of the company’s “diversity champions,” who quietly travels the Chicago area in search of community groups and schools deserving of Microsoft’s donations.
Spann “was the only one who actually came here to see for himself what this is all about,” Montgomery said. “It’s easy to throw software and hardware at a program like this. Companies do it all the time. But what we really need are their people.”
Scores of Microsoft consultants have met regularly with the DePaul students and their instructors. The company has invited each graduating class to spend a day in its downtown office.
Rivera gushes as he recounts the afternoon he sat in Microsoft’s swivel chairs, stared into their computer screens and watched his world change in an instant.
“I’m not going to be happy until I’ve got my PhD in computer science,” he said.
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