Uncovering College Board's Billion-Dollar Grip on Education | The Deep

For over 70 years, any American kid with college ambitions has had to go through the college board

to get there. The PSAT, the SAT, the APs, the registration emails, the prep courses, the practice

books. Whether you grew up in a suburb of Boston, a farm town in Kansas, or an apartment in Phoenix,

you were always destined to answer to one gatekeeper. This single non-profit corporation has had more

influence over the trajectory of your education and by extension your earning potential and social

mobility than anyone you ever voted for. What began in 1900 as a handful of elite East Coast

presidents trying to bring order to college admissions became something far bigger, a national

credentialing machine. A billion dollar ecosystem that shapes what high schools teach, what students

value and how entire generations calculate their self-worth. Is the college board actually helping

American education or is it part of the problem? As hard as it is to imagine, there was a time before

national testing requirements. From the beginning, American colleges and universities, like their

European forebears, crafted and administered their own entrance exams. For example, in 1869,

Harvard required incoming freshmen, many of them just 16 years old, to demonstrate mastery of

Latin and Greek ancient history, world geography, and even the whole of Virgil. The entrance exam

didn't bend to students. Students bent to the entrance exam. The test communicated, this is what

matters. They were a sign that the universities and colleges had done the hard work of asking

what is university education for, but all that began to change in the 20th century.

Coming off the gilded age elite intellectuals were high on rationalism and efficiency. In 1900,

12 college presidents formed the college entrance examination board. Their stated purpose was to

bring order to the Wild West of college admissions by creating standards based on reason, fairness,

and objectivity for American high school students, mostly those attending elite East Coast rep schools.

But what they actually created turned into something more like an infant cartel,

an association of suppliers, the schools themselves, coming together to set gatekeeping

standards at a high level while shutting down competition. The first college board exams

primarily focused on content and subject knowledge, not general intelligence. Then, after World

War I, Princeton psychologist and enthusiastic member of the eugenics movement Carl Brigham,

who had worked on army intelligence testing, published a study of American intelligence.

He argued that through objective scientific testing alone, we could identify a human intelligence

quotient. When the students scoring highest on his test turned out to be white, wealthy

prepschool students from the East Coast, he and many others were also convinced that this proved

the Nordic races had the highest G factor or raw intelligence. Needless to say, his experiment was

biased and lacked any kind of outsider controls. Nonetheless, Brigham pitched his early version of

the Scholastic aptitude test, the SAT, to Harvard as a way to select the very best students for

their school. Brigham's SAT pitch was revolutionary and confirmed all the priors of the broad progressive

movement of the era that promised to solve the world's problems through social engineering.

The idea of a pure intelligence test that could unlock the treasures of Harvard for anyone with

the chops seemed so American. A farm kid from Kansas could prove an intellectual capacity

equal to a prepschool graduate from Boston, the American Dream. The college board was all in

and it adopted the SAT in 1926. For the first 15 years of its existence, the SAT was regarded as a

powerful meritocratic filter, but it wasn't big business. Few Americans even went to college,

and by the 1940s only about 10,000 students or 1% of high school graduates was taking the SAT

annually. World War II changed everything. The GI Bill, which allowed returning veterans to attend

college, exploded enrollment. Millions of veterans received federally subsidized higher education,

and colleges were desperate for ways to manage the influx of applicants. The college board was

happy to step in and help. At the same time, the Truman administration formed a commission to

quote, chart the future of higher education. The commission's report, quote,

recommended the democratization of access to college. It called for a massive financial aid program

at the undergraduate and graduate levels, free tuition for those attending two-year schools,

and a program of continuing adult education. America wholeheartedly embraced Truman's vision.

In 1950, 80,000 students took the SAT. By the 1960s, the youngest baby boomers began graduating

high school, and they needed somewhere to go. Cultural momentum plus the federal subsidies and

student loan expansion created after World War II made the message clear. If you want economic

security, you go to college. College ceased to be elite formation and became middle-class

infrastructure. And the college board enjoyed a veritable monopoly being the only contractor on

hand to build the framework. The ACT came on the scene as a competitor for the SAT, but by now the

college board was big business. They had on offer the LSAT military intelligence tests for kids

wanting to avoid Korea, and the brand new AP exams so kids could earn college credit before

graduating high school. The cartels work paid off. And in 1960, 800,000 American kids lined up

and paid to take the SAT. By 1970, it was over 1.5 million. The test moved from an aptitude

assessment to a mandatory economic gateway. But for all its mass market success, the SAT just could not

shake charges of bias and disparate impact. By the 1980s and early 1990s, charges of racism

rooted in the test's Nordic supremacist origins took center stage and grew louder over the next

30 years. aptitude became code for supremacy, racial and economic. But while Karl Brigham clearly

harbored racial prejudices, was the SAT of the post-war era actually racist? Researchers

like Nicholas Lehman and Thomas Sol concluded not necessarily. Lehman in particular contended that

while college board tests and the ACT can help predict college success to a degree,

they are much more effective at indicating where a student came from in terms of class and

economic status than predicting where they are going. In this way, the tests end up reinforcing the

very class hierarchy they were meant to disrupt because scores closely track family income and

schooling. The conclusion? It was less about race and more about class and culture. Test reformers

attempted to mitigate its biases multiple times, even as the cracks in the college board's claims

about its overall project were becoming ever more obvious. In 1993, the SAT quietly disappeared

the word aptitude and became the scholastic assessment test. At the same time, the college board

doubled down on its claims to objectivity and continued to market the SAT as, quote, uncoachable.

Anyone could take it with minimal preparation, they said, and the scores would indicate college

readiness. But the data did not bear out the claims. Prep studies from the 1980s and 1990s

showed measurable gains often several dozen points with structured tutoring. While insisting

students did not need to prep, however, the board leaned aggressively into selling test prep.

In 1980, it began selling previously administered SAT tests directly to students with the release

of the booklet for SATs. The small pamphlet was so lucrative that in 1983, the college board began

regularly publishing tests in full books, available nationally called five SATs and ten SATs,

which would be wildly popular until they were discontinued in the early 2000s. And for its pains,

the college board flourished into a multi-billion dollar ecosystem. Today, the board reports annual

revenues of nearly $1.2 billion. SAT and PSAT programs earn hundreds of millions annually.

The AP program, nearly 500 million. College and career opportunities data services

over 100 million. And the board operates with surplus margins around 14 percent. But it's not

just about the money. It's also about power. The college board has positioned itself as almost

the sole arbiter of what high schools teach students about their language, about mathematics,

and the specific subjects tested by the AP and the subject tests. Control the testing,

control secondary education. Schools teach to the test. Parents pay for the test and the test

prep, and they expect the test prep to work. Students internalize test results as an indicator

of self-worth and future success. But it's more than that. Today, through its subject and AP tests,

the college board wields the power to enforce conformity in what the top students read,

how they learn history, and how they think about science and human knowledge. The influence

isn't just economic. It's also moral and spiritual. For a brief moment, COVID gave hundreds of

American colleges and universities permission to finally break out of the college board's

stranglehold on admissions. And most did for safety reasons. And most were very glad to because

of the ever-present concerns over equity. It looked like the education system might just escape

the matrix. But instead of replacing the SAT with new ways of evaluating applications,

the vast majority of schools fell back on high school GPA, which was incredibly inflated and

could not serve the purpose. See my video on why college kids can't do math. As a result,

demand for remedial first-year courses skyrocketed. And now, America's higher education institutions

led by the Ivy Leagues are re-embracing the SAT, the ACT, and the college board. The system

wins again. But who's benefiting? It's not students. The state of American education has never been

worse. It's not colleges. Even our most elite schools are scrambling to provide multiple

sections of remedial math, English composition, and study skills to incoming freshmen. It's not

the faculty who often have no role in selecting the students they will teach. To save themselves,

the universities must break the stranglehold of the college board and choose to exit the matrix.

Over 100 years ago, 12 of America's most elite schools decided collectively to outsource

the hard work of education. In so doing, they impoverished the souls and the wallets of American

students. They came together to make admissions more efficient and offloaded a question that

no school should ever abandon. What is the purpose of education? It is an ongoing struggle to

define what an educated person is or what a university is for. As history unfolds, long-established

institutions must constantly re-examine the reason for their existence. Since the progressive era,

the most recognized American universities have failed to offer a unique vision of a world

beyond the hamster wheel of success. Good grades, high test scores, college degree,

dreary professional training, and then climbing job ladders until old age claims you. But young people

want more than that. In the closing of the American mind, Alan Bloom tried to remind universities

that they have a noble role to play in a young person's life, a role far beyond technical

training. These are the charmed years when a student can become anything he wishes and when he

has the opportunity to survey his alternatives, not merely those current in his time or provided by

careers, but those available to him as a human being. The American schools today with the brightest

future have already stopped looking to the college board to tell them what their freshman class should

look like. These schools look at the students. They have forced themselves to reflect on the human

potential entrusted to them, how students who enter can be freed from Plato's cave and given

an awareness of their human dignity during their time at school. They are recovering a sense of

universal knowledge that the unity of truth leads to a unity of disciplines, departments,

and the entire vision of university life. This doesn't mean every school must become a great

book's program, although great literature is the tried and true way of training what John Henry

Newman called a true culture of mind. But the best schools will, while looking to the future,

have a deep respect for the great conversation of the Western tradition and invite their students

to confront eternal questions. And we don't have to wait for schools to wake up. It is also

possible that a standardized test could help universities recover higher standards and reinforce

a distinctive mission in society, but the college board will not be the company to do that.

The good folks at the classic learning test are hoping to provide just that test, and over 300

schools have already caught on that such a partnership benefits schools, faculty, and most of all

the students themselves. These are test makers and schools with a clear vision. They know what

education is for, and the distinct service they offer potential students. Maybe the college board

needs to go, but we shouldn't give up on the idea of a university, or the idea of a university test.

Western education flourished for over 2,000 years before the college board existed,

and I am confident it will long outlive the SAT.

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