The polling data from college campuses over the past few years paint a bleak picture of the future. More than half of college students sympathize with the terrorist group Hamas, and more than a third support violence and hate speech. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of college students identify as “gender fluid,” 44% of them report symptoms of depression, and 15% say they are considering suicide.
How did we get here? Who’s responsible for what these students have been taught leading up to college? And who’s responsible for assessing whether college applicants have the capacity to think critically and independently?
The answer is a nonprofit organization that operates more like a private company called the College Board.
In 2012, David Coleman came to the College Board after spending years designing the infamous Common Core State Standards Initiative. It will come as no surprise that the College Board aligned itself with Common Core two years later. In that same year, historians, elected officials, and academics came together to pan College Board’s changes to the 2014 AP U.S. History test, alleging the company conducted a politically biased overhaul of the curriculum.
The exam omitted Thomas Jefferson, Dwight Eisenhower, and Martin Luther King Jr. entirely. It presented a revisionist perspective on American history through a lens of oppression. Its coverage of World War II focused on the internment of Japanese Americans, challenges to civil liberties, racial and segregation debates, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb, framing them as events that “raised questions about American values.”
Hopefully, it’s starting to make sense why we’re seeing an increasingly anti-American climate on college campuses today. While the College Board scrambled to revise its AP U.S. History test after all the bad press, the company’s educational offerings still reek of political bias.
The AP African American Studies course framework designates the work of Kimberle Crenshaw, a key architect of critical race theory, as “essential knowledge.” From asking students to assess a Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) op-ed on the reading comprehension section of the SAT to equating female empowerment with low birth rates, there are seemingly endless examples of the College Board indoctrinating American students with leftist political ideology.
In February, Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, published a letter explaining that test-optional admission policies cannot be used as a mechanism to violate the race-neutral admission ruling from the Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Trainor made a great point, but what if the entity that administers testing is itself advocating the violation of that very Supreme Court ruling?
One week after the Students for Fair Admissions decision, the College Board began advising college admissions counselors on how to help black and Hispanic students frame their application essays around their race or ethnicity. That behavior from the College Board is a federal civil rights complaint waiting to happen.
THE SAT MONOPOLY IS AFRAID OF COMPETITION
In 2023, the College Board made more than a billion dollars and held more than $2 billion in cash. In the 2023-2024 school year, the state of Texas sent the College Board more than $10 million in the form of state subsidies for public school seniors taking the SAT, and the Texas Education Agency signed a $41 million contract with the College Board to subsidize AP courses. The state of Florida sent the College Board more than $20 million of its own in the same time frame.
The monopolistic stranglehold that this one organization has over education in America, even in states that radically oppose its left-wing political ideology, must come to an end. Every market benefits from competition, and the education assessment market is no different. Some other smaller companies have tried to provide a different track to students, but College Board lobbyists pounce to shut them down. No one elected a national school board. We need to break up this monopoly, rethink the College Board’s nonprofit organization status, and protect students from being scammed by this company that doesn’t have their best interests at heart.
Terry Schilling is the president of the American Principles Project.
