With students walking zombie-like through the hallways following the gauntlet of grueling and overpriced AP exams thrown at the best and brightest of PHS last week, now is as good a time as any to analyze the omnipotent organization that is the College Board.

The College Board was founded in 1900 to promote education and help students in their college prospects. However, in the last half-century, the College Board and its originally not-for-profit business model, have changed drastically. The Huffington Post reported that the College Board has “built a virtual monopoly on testing, profiting from the creation…of the testing program and its copyrighted materials,” while simultaneously using its influence in the classroom and on curriculum to make such tests (including the SATs, ACTs, and AP exams) crucial to post-secondary success. Through these methods and by charging inordinate amounts of money for the exams, plus the way that, as stated by the Atlantic,  the organization “operates like a big business” has allowed the supposedly not-for-profit company to achieve astounding financial success.

College Board employees are paid handsomely, and “according to a CNN report, recently retired President Gaston Caperton was paid more than $1 million per year.” The College Board is a “nearly $700 million per year corporation” and also made profits worth “8.6 percent of revenue, which would be respectable even for a for-profit corporation,” according to the Atlantic, in 2009 (the most current year for which such records are available. This number has most likely increased in the years since. Americans for Educational Testing Reform says that “When a non-profit company is earning those profits, something is wrong,” while its “report card” gives the college board a D and cites  numerous “areas of misconduct” by the organization.

The business model of the College Board in unique, ingenious, and unethical. It has integrated itself into secondary education, AP curriculum, and post-secondary education, and used this undue influence to create a constant stream of supply for itself by taking advantage of students seeking to further their education. It maintains a not-for-profit status, exempting it from taxation, by taking advantage of government loopholes to make record profits and pay its CEOs and other employees exorbitant salaries. It funds this as well by charging excessive fees, usually around $100 per test per student, for its exams, and by forcing students to pay the fees by either making them, in the case of SATs, a crucial part of the college application process, or, as in AP exams, by denying students their hard-earned level five credit for taking the 3 quarter classes, if they opt out of taking and paying for such exams. This allows the college board to rip off students and school systems without retribution, but also gives wealthier students an advantage over their peers, exacerbating a wider trend in the country’s socio-economic situation.

In conclusion, the current situation must change. In today’s scholastic culture, a corrupt, outdated organization lacking in common decency is taking advantage of students’ thirst for knowledge through extortion by payments in exchange for already earned credit, all the while paying their executives outlandish salaries which resemble those of hedge-fund managers, rather than educators dedicated to the public good.

This cannot be allowed to continue, for the good of our students, their educations, and their futures.