Whether it’s through student surveys, higher rates of chronic absenteeism, or declining college enrollment, more and more evidence—especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic—points to students’ growing disengagement with traditional high school and fundamentally questioning of the four-year college pathway as the norm.
It’s a reality ever apparent to David Coleman, the chief executive of the nonprofit College Board, which runs two core institutions of the college-going world: the Advanced Placement program and the SAT assessment—both programs historically aimed at high schoolers with plans to attend college.
While most students say they need post-secondary education, and enrollment in AP courses and the number of SAT test takers continues to grow, Coleman recognizes a large subset of students are disengaged from high school and aren’t proactively making post-secondary plans. At the same time, students say they want more opportunities to learn about career options and prepare directly for those possibilities.
It’s why the College Board recently has taken a decisive turn into the career exploration and preparation space. The AP program, long dominated by traditional, core academic subjects, is expanding into career and technical education classes by piloting two such courses this year that could help students earn both college credit and industry credentials. And now, after students take the SAT, they’re learning about potential career options that could be a match for them when they receive their score reports.
“For many students, they see high school life as middle school—once more with feeling,” Coleman said on Oct. 21 at the opening session of the College Board’s annual forum here in Austin. “If we are going to be relevant, if we’re going to work together for a new level of relevance, the College Board has to change fundamentally.”
New program offers high school and college credit and industry credentials
While the percentage of high school students enrolling in college has generally declined over the last few years, the number of students in undergraduate certificate programs, which train students in industry-specific skills, has grown.
As a result, more high schools have been investing in helping students explore career pathways.
One such career exploration tool has been career and technical education, or CTE.
An EdWeek Research Center survey from June found that 66 percent of school and district leaders say their districts offer students access to CTE pathways that lead to industry-recognized credentials as a way to introduce students to career options.
And 62 percent of educators said their district offers more career and technical education courses now than 10 years ago.
In line with this national trend, the College Board’s AP program is piloting the Career Kickstart program that extends the AP model to CTE.
The goal is to offer courses that satisfy high school credit requirements while also allowing students to earn college credit and an industry-recognized certification, said Clare Bertrand, executive director of career strategy for the College Board.
The CTE courses follow much of the format of traditional AP courses. The College Board sets a framework, teachers receive specialized training, and students can potentially earn college credit if they score well enough on an end-of-course exam.
The College Board is piloting two CTE courses this school year. AP Networking Fundamentals and AP Cybersecurity Fundamentals are full-year courses that some schools across the country are trying out. They feature hands-on, problem-solving activities that cover fundamentals in the field and prepare students to tackle the current—and quickly evolving—cybersecurity landscape.
Students enrolled in the pilot this year can earn high school credit and, based on their AP exam scores, are eligible to earn a voucher to cover the cost of test prep and and the exam for the related CompTIA industry-recognized certification.
“Does that student need to go into work right away? No, not at all. They may choose an internship, they may choose an apprenticeship, they may use that credential to actually get a higher-paying, part-time job while they go into a post-secondary program,” Bertrand said. “There’s a lot of flexibility in terms of how that credential will be used.”
The College Board is working to secure college-credit eligibility for the courses, in large part through partnerships with community colleges, Bertrand said.
While a CTE program by design, the College Board encourages schools to offer the Career Kickstart courses alongside existing AP courses, such as AP Computer Science Principles.
“We must end in high school and in college the unproductive divide between career education and general education,” Coleman said.
SAT becomes career conversation-starter
Students taking the College Board’s SAT last year may have noticed another way the organization is encouraging students to explore potential careers.
As the College Board prepared to turn the SAT digital, leaders heard from educators who were fielding questions from their communities about how the SAT’s assessment of student’s math and reading skills applied to careers and whether students should take the exam if they weren’t planning on a two- or four-year college pathway, said Priscilla Rodriguez, the senior vice president for college readiness assessments at the College Board.
In response, the College Board deployed a new tool with an eye toward highlighting potential careers for students.
The organization partnered with HumRRO, the Human Resources Research Organization, which matched skills tested on the SAT with skills needed in 1,000 careers in a U.S. Department of Labor database.
For the first time this past year, students could access a career insights tool in their SAT score report—a chart that maps out six different career interest areas based on students’ SAT scores. It includes information about the career paths, what post-secondary education the careers require, and how in demand these careers are in students’ home states.
The College Board doesn’t want students to think these are the only six careers the SAT recommends they pursue, Rodriguez said. Instead, the new tool is meant to serve as a conversation starter for students so they can explore a variety of careers.
“The fact of the matter is that all students are going into different places after high school,” Bertrand said. “So how do we make sure they have all the information about all of those different pathways? But again, college is a career pathway. It’s part of the multiple-pathways options for students.”
