App Academy, the #1 ranked coding school in the United States, announced today that it has launched a new online platform, App Academy Open, making their Full-Stack Web Development course available to everyone worldwide. The course will offer an identical curriculum to App Academy’s in-person training program, which has placed thousands of people in software development jobs at a median salary of $105,000. The kicker? It’s completely free.
“My college teachers and administrators didn’t really care about teaching me the skills to actually find a job and succeed in my career,” says Kush Patel, CEO and co-founder of App Academy. “Since we started App Academy in 2012, we’ve been committed to breaking down barriers of entry into the tech industry and hopefully improving the demographics within it. We began by being the first school to reverse the incentive structure of education by charging students only if they find a job. Now that we’ve proven the curriculum by training and placing thousands of software engineers, we see making our curriculum available online for free as a huge step in increasing access. We think App Academy Open will give people world class education for free and more importantly, jobs, in a way that never existed before.”
App Academy, whose core product is a 12-week, in-person web development training program, has placed thousands of people in software engineering roles at companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and more. Their graduates earn the highest median salaries of any bootcamp, starting at $105,000 in San Francisco and $90,000 in New York. Until today, students interested in joining App Academy could only do so by physically attending one of their campuses. With the launch of their new online platform, that’s no longer the case. Students can now take the same exact course online, from anywhere in the world – for free.
“We want to empower people who are looking to enter this industry, no matter who they are or where they’re from, to gain access to these high-paying positions,” says Patel. “There are over 100,000 unfilled software engineering roles open in the US each year. A big reason for that is that there are significant barriers to entry – financially, culturally, and otherwise. We want to change that. You shouldn’t need to go back to school for 4 years to be eligible for entry. It’s time for a 21st century CS degree: one that’s available online, requires no upfront cost, and most importantly, is focused on getting you hired.”
App Academy’s online platform will provide people with free access to around 1,500 hours (comparable to a CS program) of material that includes readings, videos, projects and more to help prospective coders get hired as full-stack web developers. The material has been developed over the course of six years with input from the top tech companies in the world.
Patel explains how App Academy’s program compares to that of a traditional computer science (CS) program: “We’re training people to become software engineers as opposed to computer scientists, so our curriculum is much more relevant to day-to-day work as a software engineer. This is not at all to say that a CS degree isn’t valuable. It’s just that CS degrees are built to give you a thorough understanding of computer science so that you can be prepared for a Ph.D. and academic career in the field. That’s just a different goal than what we’re aimed at: to get you a great software engineering job and give you the tools to succeed and grow in that career.”
