Nas Sponsors Tech Scholarship for African Americans and Latinos

Nas has teamed up with New York City's General Assembly to provide a scholarship for African American and Latino students in the tech field. General Assembly, which is New York City's private vocational school for programming and engineering, has started the "Opportunity Fund" to give scholarships to women, veterans, African Americans and Latinos. Nas and his Queensbridge Venture Partners will sponsor the sponsorship for black and Latino students, while Google will sponsor a scholarship for women and Hirepurpose and Microsoft will provide money for veterans. "This is the start of what hopefully will be a contribution to what will be a more diverse and accessible community worldwide," General Assembly CEO Jake Schwartz told the Observer.

The tech field (which consists is of programmers, coders, developers, engineers, etc..) is dominated by white and Asian men. Census data states that some minority populations go completely unrepresented in the tech field. Nas and General Assembly are trying to solve that problem. As a requirement, students who are granted a scholarship through the Opportunity Fund have to spend at least 100 hours teaching coding to kids in poor neighborhoods. "Being able to sort of create a program where these scholarship students have to tutor, we will kill two birds with one stone," said Schwartz.