by Jena Le ‘23

The College Board is a modern-day monopoly that has cornered the education market for grades 9-12. Because of this and the added benefits of being categorized as a non-profit, the College Board has become a massively wealthy organization that is able to charge its customers almost whatever it wants for its entrance exams and AP exams.

Monopolies, which are defined as the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service, are illegal. The Sherman Act outlaws any form of “monopolization, attempted monopolization, or conspiracy or combination to monopolize.” However, the College Board is able to bypass these restrictions because it is categorized as non-profit, which means it is not supposed to have a primary purpose of making money.

The College Board is using its profits to invest 1.2 billion dollars in private equity, hedge funds, real estate funds, all in an effort to make even more money. Adding on, The College Board has also invested about 82 million dollars less on AP exam expenditures in 2020 compared to 2019 and spent about 78 million dollars less on SAT expenditures in 2020 compared to 2019.
The stated mission of the College Board is to connect students to college success and opportunity. AP exam scores and SAT results are just some examples of the metrics that the College Board provides for colleges to assess how knowledgeable high school students are.

In this way, the College Board can theoretically prevent unfair advantages and provide equity since every student is taking the same test. This is quite appealing–and cost-effective–to colleges because they only have to look at one exam rather than factoring other metrics for academic success.

The influence of the College Board also can be seen in the high school curriculum. With 38 AP courses to choose from, most students will face the decision whether to take these advanced courses.
But is there really a choice? Most high schools in America have AP classes as the most advanced course students can take. So, students at a school like Sherwood essentially have to take College Board-designed AP classes whether they take exams or not because colleges want to see those most rigorous offered courses on the transcripts.

The College Board charges $96 per AP exam and students have pressure to pay that fee because many colleges want to see that an applying student took the course and the exam. Most colleges and universities allow students to test out of a class if their AP score reaches a certain requirement. For example, a 4 or 5 on the AP U.S. History exam tests out of Maryland’s History 200 course, saving hundreds of dollars in college tuition.

The PSAT and SAT are College Board owned tests that most college-bound students are expected to take. All of these exams and test results can be a make or break it for acceptance or rejection from dream universities. Colleges like University of Maryland and Salisbury University have only recently made these standardized test scores optional due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, more prestigious colleges like Yale and Stanford will not be test optional past 2022.

So, current juniors, sophomores, and freshmen who are looking to apply to extremely competitive schools depend on their scores from the SAT if they want to maximize their chances of getting into their college of choice.

There has also been no real competition against the College Board for the education market other than the ACT because the College Board has already implemented their curriculums in most American high schools and has made a name for themselves in colleges and universities. All of those reasons are why no new competitors are pursuing the education market at the moment.