Social Finance in The New York Times: Google Creates $100 Million Fund for Skills Training Program

Social Finance is managing the $100 million Google Career Certificates Fund, a Google-backed initiative targeting a big problem: how to find, train, and create paths to good jobs in the modern economy for the nearly two-thirds of American workers who do not have a four-year college degree. Steve Lohr profiled the program, which combines Google philanthropy with loan repayments from students, in The New York Times in February of 2022.

“I genuinely think this is one of the important areas for society to figure out,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, in an interview. If the project is successful, Pichai said, he hopes it will be a “template for other companies to do more” and show policymakers that there are better-performing alternatives to traditional government training efforts.

Google is working with three nonprofit groups on the effort: Year Up, which focuses on upward mobility programs for the disadvantaged; Merit America, an organization that offers tech training programs for adults without a bachelor’s degree; and Social Finance, which designs student-friendly financing and repayment plans. Social Finance is looking to add a few more job training groups this year to the Google Career Certificates Fund.

“We’ll allocate more funds to whoever is delivering better results,” said Tracy Palandjian, CEO and Co-Founder of Social Finance, which is not related to the online lender SoFi. “It’s all about impact.”

Read the New York Times story →

Photo courtesy of Google: Karrim Omer, Google Career Certificates Graduate, Data Analytics