Andrew Yang's nonprofit used metric that disadvantaged applicants from historically Black colleges, records show

While New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang was still running things at Venture for America, the nonprofit he founded, he "failed to recruit many participants of color," The New York Times reports.

While the Times investigation doesn't reveal specific demographic breakdowns of acceptance rates for the program, which trains recent graduates and young professionals to work at startups in cities across the United States, it did shed a light on some of the built-in challenges in the application process. Ivy League graduates had a leg up thanks to a system that gave applicants a score based on their alma mater. At the same, "internal records show the rubric ended up classifying virtually all the country's historically Black colleges in the lowest tier" even if they ranked higher than other colleges and universities in the annual rankings released by U.S. News and World Report, the Times reports.

After Yang left in 2017, former employees told the Times, Venture for America dumped the metric. Read more at The New York Times.

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