On a sunny day in July, some 35 budding computer science students sat in a large room with beige walls and blocks of tables arranged into nine group work stations. The room was a temporarily commandeered art gallery in New York City, directly underneath the city’s High Line park, in a now-gentrified neighborhood that was once the seedy heart of Bohemia. Below the tables snaked power strips secured to the floor with electrical tape. Above them, a sea of adolescent faces — overwhelmingly male — stared intently into their MacBooks, typing and occasionally reaching for bowls of snacks that seemed rarely out of reach.
This was the summer academy of Make School: an eight-week intensive app- and game-building course that aspires to create the next generation of Silicon Valley hires. In two months, Make School students, aged 13 to 25, are expected to conceive, build, and release an app of their own creation for download in Apple’s App Store. “We believe the app is the new resume, a portfolio of products is more powerful than any credential,” says the school in its mission statement. “We believe coding is the world’s first superpower, our students help make the world a better place.”
One of the students I met at the academy, a 16-year-old from New York, echoed this sentiment. According to him, it was better to work in app development than, say, medicine, because doctors had to go to school for a decade and then could only help one person at a time. By contrast, building apps enabled even high school kids to create something that could be downloaded by tens of thousands of people around the world.
The New York school was one of three summer academies begun by Make School’s cofounders, Ashu Desai and Jeremy Rossmann. The two also have academies in Palo Alto and San Francisco, the latter serving as the site of Make School’s two-year “college replacement” program, swapping traditional university education for a streamlined tech curriculum. Geared towards high school and college students with basic coding experience, Make School’s summer academies build upon the trend of “maker education” that’s been gaining steam in the tech community. (An increasing number of startup moguls send their children to schools that teach math and science not by standard curricula but instead by hands-on experiments like building light bulbs.)
Make School sees itself in the same tradition: light on lectures, heavy on hands-on learning. Students, who pay $6,000 for the two-month course — with scholarships available to about half, largely targeted at increasing diversity — learn mostly by doing. They first clone existing apps and games like Evernote, Instagram, and Angry Birds. They then advance to experiments with artificial intelligence and robots — and, finally, they create their own programs.
Most of the students in the academy came by way of previous computer science immersion. A favorite high school teacher may have heard about the course, or the student may have participated in an overnight “hackathon” at a regional college. But what makes Make School different from other coding boot camps is that it’s not just about the computers; it’s also about the culture.
Make School is, according to one student, an “eight-week hackathon” that offers a glimpse into the highly coveted Silicon Valley startup world.
Like many good tech narratives, Make School’s origin story begins with its founders dropping out of college. Ashu Desai and Jeremy Rossmann went to high school together in Palo Alto. When he was 16, Desai built an iOS game called Helicopter, similar to other games that at the time were only available on Facebook or Android. His adaptation came at a fortuitous moment, right at the launch of Apple’s App Store, and after a tongue-in-cheek rollout — “For only 99 cents your life will be complete,” Desai wrote in an early advertisement for his game — he ended up selling some 50,000 copies and making $35,000. Desai was the only student in his high school who’d built his own app, and some small tech startups began to woo him.
Desai instead enrolled at UCLA in 2010 to study computer science, while Rossmann went to MIT for the same. But while in school, both found that their courses — weighted towards the theory of computer science, and away from app development — didn’t feel relevant to their desire to build products and found startups.
Desai, who said he’s never felt as engaged as while creating his first game, found himself bored and avoiding class. Now a sharply-dressed 22-year-old, wearing crisp blue pants and rounded black frame glasses on the day I met him, he remembered, “I didn’t feel like I was building cool things.”
In the summer after Desai’s freshman and Rossmann’s sophomore years, the two went back to their high school and invited 30 students to build gaming apps in their shared Palo Alto apartment, as part of a startup program they called MakeGamesWithUs. Students created song-guessing games (“Name That Jam”) and apps that would allow friends to trade dares back and forth. When their program attracted the attention of business accelerator Y Combinator in 2012, Desai and Rossmann felt things were progressing well enough that they could both withdraw from their respective colleges to focus on their new company, soon rebranded as Make School.
(In a 2014 TEDx talk for students, “5 lessons for high school students who want to change the world,” Rossmann proudly introduced himself as an MIT dropout — before going on to warn the audience that despite his own standing, or the legends of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, dropping out of college does not equal guaranteed startup success.)
After two years of summer academies, which saw graduates go on to internships at companies like Pandora and Snapchat, Desai said they felt their initial hopes were vindicated. “High school students could build pro-quality apps that get them internships at Facebook and Google, while their friends [at college] aren’t even getting interviews,” he said.
In 2014, the two decided to expand Make School again, launching a pilot two-year college alternative for students who felt traditional school wasn’t providing the right education for the startup marketplace. Desai said they were also motivated by a resounding complaint they heard from friends working in Silicon Valley—that many bright young hires weren’t entering the workplace with the right skill set. Tech giants might still look to computer science schools like MIT as a natural farm team for software talent, but, Desai said, impressive college degrees often served more as “a filter for intelligence, rather than [an indication] that they’d learned the right things.” When new Silicon Valley employees did know enough coding to be useful, Desai added, they were most likely to have picked it up outside the classroom.
As Rossmann put it in his TEDx talk, “At the end of college there is a huge difference in how hirable, how knowledgeable, and how successful students will be between those have stopped at what class asked of them — those who just completed the problem sets, did the in-class assignments — and those who went beyond, or around, and built things and released things.”
Desai said that instead, he and Rossmann set out to create the college experience they wished they’d had. They built the world’s first “Product University,” an educational environment geared exclusively towards the development, building, and marketing of new software, which could nimbly adapt its curricula in response to what tech companies say they need. Despite its anti-college origins, Make School’s curriculum has been picked up as a supplement to traditional curricula at technology-minded universities like UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT.
In its initial 2014–2015 session, the school drew students who had foregone traditional schools to attend, including one who passed up a full-ride scholarship to MIT; some of the school’s most prominent students (some just a year or two out of high school) were recruited by startups and large tech companies, where they made six-figure salaries in their first year.
Part of Make School’s lure, in addition to the promise of networking with Silicon Valley luminaries, is its deferred tuition plan that is contingent on job placement. Students don’t pay tuition up-front, but rather reimburse Make School based on what they end up earning, should they land a job in their field. When Make School is able to secure students an internship in between its eight-month training blocks, students agree to give 100 percent of what they’re paid — tech industry interns in San Francisco earn an average of $6,000 per month before living stipends, Venture Beat recently reported — to Make School. After they graduate, they commit to giving the school a quarter of their salaries for their first two years in the field. It could seem like a gamble: if they don’t get jobs, they owe nothing, but if they do, they could end up paying $60–80,000 for a program that does not confer any recognized degree.
For many, however, it seems like a good gamble. The school received 750 applications for the 30 spots available for its next enrollment period. In accordance with the school’s maker philosophy, students first apply online with an overview of their programming experience, past projects, and career goals. Promising applicants are then selected for video interviews and a math olympiad-style assessment test.
“Tech companies these days don’t care much for a degree; they care about what you’ve built and what you can do,” said Desai. “People tend to be evaluated by three word monikers — ‘CS major at Stanford,’ ‘software engineer at Google’. Once they get their first job, it becomes largely irrelevant where they went to college.”
Desai added that traditional computer science majors graduate with significantly more debt. “Four years after entering Make School, students will have no debt and two years of professional experience under their belt. Even after paying $60–80,000, it’s a huge win compared to being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt after four years.”
As one might imagine, traditional computer science programs have some skepticism. Philip Guo, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Rochester, said that there’s a distinction between coding bootcamps geared towards older students— often adult learners looking to make a job switch, or burnish their skills, for whom an accelerated course might be the only option — and those that are aimed at 17-year-olds as a college replacement.
“My personal feeling is it’s a more risky move to skip college to do this two-year training,” said Guo. “I’m obviously biased, being a professor at a traditional university, but I’d say that one criticism is that [these programs] teach specific technology, whatever is most marketable today, whatever buzz thing that will get you a job today, but that it might not hold three years from now.”
By contrast, he added, “The benefit of learning computer science fundamentals in a university setting is that you learn things that expire less quickly. They’re more timeless.”
Still, tech media swooned over Make School’s promise to upend tech education. When Make School lamented that schools were overpriced and turning out students incapable of meeting market demand, the website TechCrunch lauded it as the vanguard of a new breed of education, capable of addressing both high tuition and poor academic outcomes. On Twitter, a young app creator cheered, “How do we fix our shitty educational system? Drop it and do exactly what @MakeSchool does. #revolution.”
For some Make Camp students, Desai’s complaints about traditional education ring true. Shriya Nevatia, 23, had just graduated from Tufts University in Boston, with a degree in computer science, when she joined Make School this summer. While she said she’d learned a lot of foundational background at Tufts, much of it seemed outdated, or just out-of-sync with her aspirations.
“Computer science education as an undergrad is very much directed towards going to grad school or working at a very large company like Microsoft,” Nevatia said. “For people who want to work at startups, who are going to be building apps and websites, they’re going to be developing with contemporarily-popular languages like Python, rather than older languages like C++ and Java, which is what we learned in school. I got frustrated, and I think people who want to start startups get frustrated, because there’s such a divide between what you want to do and what your major is.”
The schools didn’t seem to realize that this disconnect was pushing many students to have to look for supplemental education elsewhere, she added. “I felt like everything that would have helped me get a job or build a startup I had to do on my own time, because it just wasn’t being taught at school,” she said. “A lot of us felt the same thing — we’d have school projects that took 20 or 30 hours, but the things that would get us hired, like going to hackathons, were things we did on our own.”
Anthony Carnevale, who directs the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, agreed. “In general what we’re seeing is that the rate of change in skills on the job — the tasks that people actually perform [at work] — are changing at a much faster rate than the traditional post-high school education system can possibly keep up with.”
At Make School, Nevatia spent the summer refining an app she called Easy Budget, to help recent graduates create and maintain a budget. She did comparative research, wrote design documents, and finally used a “wireframe” and began building the app. While she doesn’t plan on turning Easy Budget into a startup, she felt she’d gained enough skills to propose building custom business apps for freelance clients.
Most of all, she said, “I loved the fact that at the end we can say, ‘I made this myself from scratch.’”
By mid-July, the students in New York had just entered week five of the course. After early lessons in different coding languages — including Python — and group brainstorming sessions, they were largely on their own for the second half of the program. Some worked on apps to fix the challenges of their own lives — attendance-taking and scheduling apps for high school students with too many extracurricular activities, apps that let students track their mandatory community service hours — while others focused on games, lots of games.
For some, it was exciting to have something publicly available on the App Store.
“I think when I’m applying for internships, it will be useful to show what I actually built,” said Juliana Hong, an 18-year-old who plans to study computer science at Cornell University this fall.
For others, like Edgar Johnson, an 18-year-old Chicago native and a computer engineering sophomore at Mississippi’s Jackson State University, Make School proved a vital intervention for lessons he didn’t learn in college. A sharp student, Johnson had applied last year for an internship with NASA. He’d passed the interview process, he said, but when it came to an aptitude test before the internship began, Johnson did well on the science and math, but poorly on the coding. When he asked how he could improve his skills, he was pointed towards Make School. He came to New York two weeks into the program, and said that even with his delayed start, he’d learned more there than he had from his college professors.
Perhaps still dreaming of NASA, Johnson built a game, Galaxy Crushers, and after a month, said that he’d already been told the game was an MVP — business talk for minimum viable product, one with a high likely return and low risk.
It wasn’t the only business lesson he’d learned. Johnson has also gotten involved in investing, after someone at the school gave him a book on the stock market. He’s since built a small portfolio of companies he thinks could do well after an economic collapse.
That gets at the other part of Make School, which seems somewhat less idealistic that its founders’ promise to “change the world” through apps. Although Desai frequently says that Make School provides the only environment where students build the app of their dreams without worrying about profits, on the day I visited, the school seemed as much business school as visionary tech camp.
Partway through the day, a guest lecturer arrived: Andrew Staub, former head of growth for Venmo, a payment app that bills itself as the fun alternative to Paypal. Staub, who said he came to the tech world as a refugee from investment banking, taught the Make School students about expanding the app startups they might one day create. On a PowerPoint presentation projected onto the gallery wall, he taught them to follow “product marketing for pirates,” which — like many Silicon Valley “disruptions,” I came to realize — is less fun than it sounds. There aren’t any swashbuckling sword fights in pirate marketing, just the acronym AARRR, which lays out the steps of expanding one’s user base: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, revenue. (The chief trick to getting more people to use your app, Staub advised, was making it seem like everyone else is already on it.)
I know I wasn’t the intended audience, but the marketing lecture left me feeling curmudgeonly. How many apps do we really need? Why does sending money need to be fun or shareable on social media? And yes, get off my lawn.
While I’m not normally one to hyperventilate over the shaping of young minds, Make School’s concerted focus on the business side of creation seemed to leave some other considerations — perhaps ones that might be picked up in the traditional colleges Make School scorns, like the humanities or social sciences — out of the mix.
A few examples stood out. While Make School’s college replacement program advertises that it covers ethics and politics, the examples seemed limited to how companies like Airbnb and Uber can navigate labor complaints from the hospitality and transportation industries. On a YouTube overview of Make School, Desai said, “Twenty years ago if you wanted to start a clothing line, you needed a factory; today you only need a laptop.” It’s hard not to respond that the factories continue to exist — they’re just farther from the glow of the Valley.
“Entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be evil,” Desai said when I brought this up. He pointed to the creation of one Make School graduate: Harlan Kellaway, who built an app called Refuge Restrooms that helps trans people locate safe bathrooms where they won’t be harassed. “We shy away from students building apps just to sell thousands of apps,” said Desai. “We want to teach them they can make the world a better place.”
But for every app that might tilt the world towards greater justice, Make School speaks far more about its success as measured by graduates’ starting salaries, and how the school is becoming a preferred hiring ground for billion-dollar companies.
The disconnect between the lofty rhetoric of tech revolution and the reality of its entanglement with the sins of capitalism render some of Make School’s utopian claims suspect. But that’s probably true of the entire tech industry. And, as Georgetown’s Anthony Carnevale said, programs like Make School are less a cause than an effect of broader changes in both the education system and the economy.
College is no longer just a place for people to acquire a love of learning, Carnevale said, but increasingly a prerequisite for most employment. And with an average of three million new high school graduates every year, and stubbornly high college tuition costs, post-secondary education is changing for the majority of students. Traditional liberal arts education is becoming a “luxury.”
Sixty-five percent of the $772 billion postsecondary college industry is now occupational education, and entrepreneurs are eagerly hoping to carve off a slice of that $500 billion opportunity. The leanness of programs like Make School — not liable for covering the costs of a university chapel, library, or lacrosse team — becomes an asset.
“They don’t have to pay for courses on the role of technology in the French Revolution,” Carnevale said. “They’re much more efficient. Which is why they win these fights: they can unbundle the knowledge required and pare it down to what’s absolutely required on the job, and deliver it in relatively small bites. People are trying to unbundle a $500 billion market and cut out the places where you can make money.”
What’s lost, of course, is the other purpose of education — what Carnevale described as the democratic ideal of making a more well-rounded person, strengthening the individual and not the economy. “We’re sort of recreating the British aristocracy here,” he said. “What has been happening rapidly in the U.S. is that the full education model is only for students from upper-income families who tend to be white and tend to have high test scores.”
But it’s not all bad news, he said; he likes academies like Make School, as long as they actually provide the leg up that they claim. “The good news is that education is very valuable,” he said. “Even if you’re getting a coding certificate, that’s very valuable, it is opportunity. It’s not the full tray of learning that historically associated with higher education. But they will increase the economic value and empower people with a way to make a living.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Teagan Widmer created an app in Make School called Refuge Restrooms. Make School student Harlan Kellaway created the app, based on Teagan Widmer’s previously existing website of the same name.
