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Education

Want To Go To College? Pay the College Board (bloomberg.com) 47

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The College Board, described as a $2 billion nonprofit, functions as the primary gatekeeper for academic success within American higher education, according to an analysis by Bloomberg. The organization significantly shapes university admissions by controlling not only who gains entry to college but also influencing what students know upon arrival.

This central role in managing and defining higher education admissions positions the Board uniquely. The story adds: The College Board writes the curriculum for 40 AP courses, administers and grades the exams, oversees the PSAT and SAT, and offers a variety of free and paid resources to help prepare for the courses and tests. Many students will wind up paying the company north of $1,000 over the course of their high school career. "If the same people can create the content and create the tests, that's a really great business model where you've got the whole public secondary education system wrapped up in one little company," says Jon Boeckenstedt, the vice provost of enrollment management at Oregon State University and a prominent critic of the College Board.

Housing so many parts of the high school experience under one roof has made the New York-based organization immensely wealthy, with more than $1 billion in annual revenue -- on which it pays no taxes as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. But mere money isn't the biggest source of the College Board's might. Twelve decades after its creation, it's now the closest thing the fragmented American educational system has to a central governing body, with a huge amount of authority over what students are expected to know when they get to college. Higher education is arguably the most important driver of social mobility, as well as the most powerful force in selecting which members of the next generation will set the political and cultural agenda. By controlling who gets in and what they know when they get there, the College Board has become the chief gatekeeper of academic success in America.
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Want To Go To College? Pay the College Board More

Want To Go To College? Pay the College Board

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  • Don't they have a similar thing... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    for doctors and lawyers? And like this, all paid for by the public?

    The world is a scam. And we have to keep people poor so they can't rise up against us.

  • Really Need more TRADES! (Score:3)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Friday March 28, 2025 @01:29PM (#65265605)

    Really Need more TRADES!
    and more jobs should go to the trades system.

    • Really Need more TRADES!
      and more jobs should go to the trades system.

      Jobs should go to the trades ... ok, so do we complain to the Job Allocation Commissar to do that? Oh big no on that huh...

      Maybe you mean more graduating students should go to the trades? Like by force, ehh.. that's still a little too communist... or by more active recruiting right!?

      If only there was a way of looking at your prospective workforce and trying to div.. *shit* BROADen the pool of applicants equi... *fuckshit* throw a wide net to all four corners, all the axes, or uh dimensions, of your search s

    • Or do we just want lower wages for people in the trades?

      As it stands I don't know how you make a living in the trades. But very very top guys who have tons of experience and specialized knowledge top out at around 75,000 a year. And that's the national average it's taking into account The higher cost of living in places like California.

      Did you ever maybe think there's a reason kids aren't going into the trades at the rates people who have to employ tradesmen want?

      And then you've got Schrodinger'

  • unlimited student loans is killing US the schools have little to no risk if an student takes out 100K-200K+ in loans and can't pay them back.
    Also all of fees on top of tuition can add up with some being real rip offs.

  • Abdication of Responsibility (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Friday March 28, 2025 @01:38PM (#65265643) Journal
    Well if US governments at either state or federal levels abdicate their educational responsibilities by failing to provide standardised exams to assess the knowledge of their students what you do expect is going to happen? In every other country I'm aware of the local or national governments set up and control school assessments as part of their mandate to provide education and those of us at the universities use those. If your governments refuse to do that then it's hard to blame your universities for turning to someone else who will.

    Indeed, setting national exams to assess students sounds like a job for your department of education and perhaps if it had been doing something essential like that it would have been far harder to dismantle.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by migos ( 10321981 )
      The way things are going red states will score lower in standardized tests, at which point GOP will throw a fit and want DEI admissions for kids from red states.

    • Re:Abdication of Responsibility (Score:4, Insightful)

      by PPH ( 736903 ) on Friday March 28, 2025 @02:00PM (#65265745)

      This.

      The Trump era of the demise of the Department of Education aside, where were the Dems while the College Board was monopolizing the college entrance market? With which party does the majority of the board align?

      • This.

        The Trump era of the demise of the Department of Education aside, where were the Dems while the College Board was monopolizing the college entrance market? With which party does the majority of the board align?

        What problem in particular is anyone trying to solve here?

        Different standardized tests? The government to pay it? Take it over by a for-profit company?

  • Looking at their F990... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by aaarrrgggh ( 9205 ) on Friday March 28, 2025 @01:53PM (#65265715)

    After looking at their IRS Form 990 (a great exercise if you are considering giving money to any organization), I don't understand why they can call themselves a nonprofit. The CEO makes $2.3 million, the president $1.6 million, and they have several top executives over $500k. They only have one program segment that spends more money than its associated revenue, and that is "Other Services Research and Advocacy".

    • Re:Looking at their F990... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Friday March 28, 2025 @02:37PM (#65265867)

      Well, they *have* to. If they didn't pay the execs that much, they'd be making a profit!

    • Non profit doesn't mean shit anymore. Look at UPMC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      100,000 employees and "non profit" status.

      • 100,000 employees and "non profit" status.

        Those two things are not related. If a food bank operated across the entire country, and therefore had thousands of employees, would you complain that it isn't really a non-profit?

    • To be quite blunt, the exact same thing could be said about many "non-profit" universities. The UC president is paid in total comp around $1M, and the chancellors of each UC school are paid between $785,000 and $1.2M.

      Maybe all secondary education systems should have their "non-profit" status revisited.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Basically they're a nonprofit to avoid paying taxes. Because they have for decades been the company every student had to contribute hundreds of dollars to for standardized tests. Every student has to pay those fees and the only thing they really do is write questions and other stuff. In other words, their expenses are very small and they rake in tons of money every year.

      They literally have money flowing in and aren't able to spend it all. Enough that they own several luxury hotels and other things

  • Bananas (Score:3)

    by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Friday March 28, 2025 @02:28PM (#65265833)
    Really -- every AP course is the same, which means when all of these high schoolers get together in college they have little to learn from each other. This lack of diversity in education is at least as risky to society as having a major food crop be genetically homogeneous.

  • Wut? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fropenn ( 1116699 ) on Friday March 28, 2025 @02:55PM (#65265939)
    What a dumb, misinformed article.

    Most public higher education institutions do NOT require submission of a standardized test to be considered for admission. And those that do, you can submit an alternate standardized test (such as the ACT) instead.

    Similarly, in nearly all states, colleges are NOT required to accept AP scores for credit (and even those states that require institutions to accept such credits, they often do not count toward most degree programs). Many institutions and states also offer alternative pathways to earn college credits via a test.

    The content of the AP exams is set collaboratively, with input from high school teachers and college professors, among others. The AP exams are scored by machine (for multiple choice sections and some written sections) or by certified high school teachers and college professors who get paid in the summer to score them.

    As far as a governing body for education, and claiming that's the College Board, that's ridiculous. It's really the state boards of education of California and Texas, as they set standards and, as the two largest states, the textbook / curriculum companies write their materials to fit those two states' requirements. (Common core was also hugely influential, but that's now a dirty word, even though it was a consortium of mostly conservative governors who wanted to collaborate on K-12 curriculum issues.)

    As far as the "non-profit" status goes...ha...my local hospital is "non-profit," too, and the CEO there gets I think over $900k plus incentive bonuses...but they also manage the employment of a few thousand people and are responsible for the health of tens of thousands of patients...it's a big job with lots of responsibility.

    Now, all that said, the testing companies (Pearson, College Board, ACT) do have an outsized influence on education, and it should be examined and we should be wary about it, as it seems easier and easier to buyoff legislators, but this article exaggerates it so much it is laughable.

  • The College Board writes the curriculum for 40 AP courses, administers and grades the exams, oversees the PSAT and SAT, and offers a variety of free and paid resources to help prepare for the courses and tests. Many students will wind up paying the company north of $1,000 over the course of their high school career.

    Describe "many” and who is being paid. The PSAT costs $18 and the SAT costs $68. While prep courses might be recommended for some students, they are optional. The vast majority of students I know who paid for prep courses were for private, third party companies like Kaplan and Princeton Reviews which are very expensive. The story makes it seem that the College Board is charging $1000 per student when it might be other companies.

  • "Higher education is arguably the most important driver of social mobility, as well as the most powerful force in selecting which members of the next generation will set the political and cultural agenda."

    I doubt that now. The value of a college education is diluted heavily with so many students coming in. And based on the last election, it seems the non-college educated demographics decided the political agenda [apnews.com]. Meanwhile higher education is just burying whole generations in debt that they can't cl

  • Higher education is a highly lucrative business. Like Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, the College Board is a very lucrative monopoly. The people who manage the non-profit corporations in that business pull down salaries just like the folks that manage for-profit corporations in other industries.Same can be said of the health care industry. You can whine about it, but there isn't much you can do about it short of a revolution or trying to position yourself to get a share of the take.

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