Two years ago, Lizmary Fernandez took a detour from studying to be an immigration attorney to join a free Apple course for making iPhone apps. The Apple Developer Academy in Detroit launched as part of the company’s $200 million response to the Black Lives Matter protests and aims to expand opportunities for people of color in the country’s poorest big city.
But Fernandez found the program’s cost-of-living stipend lacking—“A lot of us got on food stamps,” she says—and the coursework insufficient for landing a coding job. “I didn’t have the experience or portfolio,” says the 25-year-old, who is now a flight attendant and preparing to apply to law school. “Coding is not something I got back to.”
Since 2021, the academy has welcomed over 1,700 students, a racially diverse mix with varying levels of tech literacy and financial flexibility. About 600 students, including Fernandez, have completed its 10-month course of half-days at Michigan State University, which cosponsors the Apple-branded and Apple-focused program.
WIRED reviewed contracts and budgets and spoke with officials and graduates for the first in-depth examination of the nearly $30 million invested in the academy over the past four years—almost 30 percent of which came from Michigan taxpayers and the university’s regular students. As tech giants begin pouring billions of dollars into AI-related job training courses across the country, the Apple academy offers lessons on the challenges of uplifting diverse communities.
Measuring Success
Seven graduates who spoke with WIRED said they had good experiences at the academy, citing benefits such as receiving mentorship from past students. Fernandez says she was impressed by a focus on developing inclusive apps and a series of speakers from Apple who were genuinely willing to help and share frank lessons. “Their heart was in the right place,” she says.
The program does expose people of color to new possibilities. “It changed my life,” says Min Thu Khine, who’s now mentoring coding students and working at an Apple Store Genius Bar. “My dream is to be a software engineer at Apple.”
The academy also draws positive grades from some researchers who study tech education, such as Quinn Burke. He says its fully subsidized in-person instruction surpasses the quality of many coding bootcamps, which proliferated over the past decade and sometimes left students in debt and with narrow skills.
But the academy being open to all can complicate instruction and how to measure success. One entire family attended together, and at least two mothers have come with their daughters. Students on average are in their 30s, ranging from 18-year-olds to, for example, a grandfather in his 70s who wanted to develop a photo app for his grandchild, according to Sarah Gretter, the academy leader for Michigan State.
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