The Apple Apps course costs $20,000 per student. Is it really worth it?

2 years ago, Lizmarie Fernandez took a detour from her studies to become an immigration lawyer to join Apple’s free course on creating iPhone apps. Apple’s Developer Academy was launched in Detroit 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 that the program’s cost-of-living stipend was nonexistent — “A lot of us were on food stamps,” she says — and that the coursework was insufficient to land a job in programming. “I didn’t have the experience or the portfolio,” says the 25-year-old, who now works as a flight attendant and is preparing to go to law school. “Programming is not something I went back to.”

Since 2021, the academy has welcomed more than 1,700 students, an ethnically diverse mix with varying levels of technical knowledge and financial flexibility. About 600 students, including Fernandez, completed the 10-month, half-day course at Michigan State University, which sponsors the Apple-branded, Apple-focused program.

WIRED reviewed contracts and budgets and spoke with administrators and alumni for the first in-depth examination of the nearly $30 million invested in the academy over the past four years — nearly 30 percent of which came from Michigan taxpayers and regular university students. As tech giants begin pouring billions of dollars into AI-related career training courses across the country, Apple Academy offers lessons on the challenges of uplifting diverse communities.

Measuring success

Seven alumni who spoke with WIRED said they had good experiences at the academy, citing benefits such as receiving mentorship from former students. Fernandez says she was impressed by the focus on developing end-to-end apps and the series of Apple speakers who were genuinely willing to help and share candid lessons. “Their heart was in the right place,” she says.

The program exposes people of color to new possibilities. “It changed my life,” says Min Thu Khin, who now mentors coding students and works at the Apple Store Genius Bar. “My dream is to become a software engineer at Apple.”

The academy also gets positive marks from some researchers who study technology education, such as Quinn Burke. He says the fully subsidized in-person instruction is superior to the quality of many coding bootcamps, which have proliferated over the past decade and sometimes left students in debt and with limited skills.

But the fact that the academy is open to everyone can complicate the teaching process and how success is measured. An entire family attended together, and at least two mothers attended with their daughters. The students average in their 30s, and range in age from 18 to a grandfather in his 70s, for example, who wanted to develop a photo app for his grandson, according to Sarah Greiter, the academy’s leader at Michigan State.