The College Board is making more moves into the career exploration and preparation space, driven by growing demand by students for more opportunities to build job-related skills.
The nonprofit organization, which runs major programs aimed at students who plan to attend college, announced a partnership with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in December to expand the teacher pipeline for career-connected coursework. Then, in January, the College Board announced that it acquired nonprofit District C and its flagship work-based learning program Teamship.
These ventures come on the heels of the College Board’s announcement in late 2024 that it was expanding its Advanced Placement program into career and technical education classes.
The organization’s investments highlight the need to expose all students to the many careers and pathways available to them so they can make informed decisions about what career paths to pursue, said Alisha Hyslop, the chief policy, research, and content officer for the Association for Career and Technical Education. Similar organizations, such as the International Baccalaureate and the Cambridge International Education, have created career-focused programs, too, she said.
These developments are happening as a growing number of students are feeling disengaged with traditional high school and students and parents are questioning the return on investment of a four-year college education. There are persistently high rates of chronic absenteeism in K-12 education, low rates of college readiness among high school seniors, and declining college enrollment.
“If you think of high school as the time where kids need to—in order to stay engaged—get more actively involved in their learning, what should probably happen?” asked David Coleman, the CEO of the College Board in an interview with Education Week. “You want them to take a step closer to college. You want them to get closer to a career.”
Many school districts are shifting away from an exclusive focus on college preparedness and are providing opportunities for students to explore and engage with a broad range of post-high school pathways.
Hyslop hopes that with a big player like the College Board entering the CTE space, it “reinforces that CTE and that career-related experiences are important for every student, regardless of what path they’re on,” she said. It will also draw attention “to blending academics and CTE in new and innovative ways, so that all students have access to that full spectrum of educational opportunities.”
‘We have to invest in our teachers adapting quickly’
The partnership between the College Board and the Carnegie Foundation will launch a multi-state coalition and support states as they redesign teacher pathways, update certification systems, and expand access to career-connected courses in high-demand fields, according to a College Board news release.
“If we hope and expect young people to learn new things in the changing world of work, our teachers need to, too,” Coleman said. “We have to make it much easier for high school teachers to learn new things, but we don’t have many good ways for them to learn new things.”
Filling open CTE positions has been a big concern for school districts, Hyslop said. Twenty-eight states reported CTE teacher shortages to the U.S. Department of Education for the 2023-24 school year. Administrators responding to a national 2024 Brookings Institution survey said they had trouble filling CTE positions 57% of the time, compared with 39% of the time when recruiting teachers for traditional academic positions.
“CTE teachers have to have even more skills, in some cases, than teachers in other areas,” Hyslop said. “They have to have the pedagogy and the content knowledge, but the content is constantly changing.”
The College Board and Carnegie Foundation partnership is focused on “a lighter-weight mechanism,” in which all teachers could learn to teach a new course in an area that’s interesting to them, Coleman said.
The organizations are eyeing a system that’s more adaptable than a graduate program or the traditional teacher-certification system, Coleman said.
The most in-demand careers—in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, business—are evolving quickly, Coleman said. “That means we have to invest in our teachers adapting quickly.”
The work that the College Board and Carnegie Foundation are doing “fits right in” with what states are already thinking about, Hyslop said.
States are looking for certification systems that can be flexible, Hyslop said. Generally, teachers are certified in their specific CTE course, but with “the way new careers are coming out all the time, states can’t possibly create a certification for every single possible combination of career fields,” she said.
The College Board wants work-based learning for all students
The College Board’s acquisition of District C builds upon its career-readiness work.
Part of the student disengagement problem is that kids can’t always see how what they’re learning in traditional academic subjects connects to the real world. To keep students actively engaged in their learning, it’s not just about taking them a step closer to college and career, Coleman said. It’s also about giving them work-based learning experiences.
District C’s Teamship product is a work-based learning program where small teams of students tackle real problems for real businesses, building the meaningful problem-solving skills that will help them in the future, according to the College Board.
With Teamship, Coleman envisions every student, regardless of the courses they’re taking, gaining workplace experience.
“Someday, wouldn’t it be cool if kids in an AP Business/Personal Finance class were developing business plans and—adding workplace experience—they could learn what happens to a business plan when it hits the reality of working a business? Sure would,” Coleman said.
Work-based learning has been harder to scale up, Hyslop said, especially in classes that aren’t traditionally CTE classes, such as biology, physics, and calculus, she said.
“If this [acquisition] is an effort to embed those [career-ready] skills and provide students who may not have thought about a work-related experience with more opportunities, then I think that’s a real positive,” Hyslop said.
