Ridesharing company Lyft has announced plans to partner with online credentialing and nanodegree company Udacity to begin offering scholarships to learners who want to develop self-driving cars.
Officials say that the program is designed to invite minorities into racially homogenous STEM maker space – a move that at once slaps at competitor Uber’s issues with diversity, and champions black and Latino creators coming into the future of transportation commerce.
Diversity is crucial for creating solutions that serve everyone, and ridesharing is for everyone. That’s why these scholarships will specifically target communities that are underrepresented in technology in the US.
It is a program that could only fly with private partnerships in the for-profit sector, because non-profit schools with similar goals in program development face long, tedious processes in getting approval from internal faculty stakeholders, accrediting agencies, and state authorization guidelines. More….