Two years ago Lizmary Fernandez dropped out of college to become an immigration lawyer to take a free Apple course on iPhone app development. The company launched the Apple Developer Academy in Detroit 200 million dollars in response to Black Lives Matter protests and aims to expand opportunities for people of color in the nation’s poorest immense city.
But Fernandez said the program’s stipend to cover living costs was insufficient – “A lot of us were on food stamps,” she says – and the classes were insufficient to land a job as a programmer. “I had no experience or portfolio,” says the 25-year-old, who is currently a flight attendant and preparing to study law. “Coding is not something I have gone back to.”
As of 2021, the academy has more than 1,700 students, a racially diverse mix with varying levels of technology savvy and financial flexibility. About 600 students, including Fernandez, completed the 10-month, half-day course at Michigan State University, which co-sponsors the program focused on the Apple and Apple brand.
WIRED reviewed contracts and budgets and interviewed officials and alumni for the first in-depth analysis of the nearly $30 million invested in the academy over the past four years, nearly 30 percent of which came from Michigan taxpayers and the university’s regular students. As tech giants begin investing billions of dollars in AI-related job training across the country, Apple Academy offers lessons on the challenges of uplifting diverse communities.
Measuring success
The program opens up recent opportunities for people of color. “It changed my life,” says Min Thu Khine, who now mentors coding students and works at the Genius Bar in the Apple Store. “My dream is to become a software engineer at Apple.”
The academy is also receiving positive reviews from some technology education researchers, such as Quinn Burke. He argues that the fully subsidized classroom classes are superior in quality to many of the boot camps that have grown in number over the past decade and have sometimes left students in debt and with narrow skills.
However, the fact that the academy is open to all can complicate teaching and measuring success. The entire family attended the meeting, and at least two mothers came with their daughters. According to Sarah Gretter, director of the academy at Michigan State, the students are on average in their 30s, ranging from 18-year-olds to, for example, a grandfather in his 70s who wanted to develop a photo-taking app for his grandson.