The College Board is making a key addition to its 70-year-old Advanced Placement program: creating courses with significant input from the business community—not just higher education—and with career development in mind.
The change is in part a response to students’ disengagement with high school courses that feel irrelevant to their futures, said David Coleman, the non-profit’s CEO in a wide-ranging interview last month.
It is also a bid to ensure AP classes remain valuable to students in a workplace increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence. AI-powered tools can already pass nearly every AP test.
The first two of this new breed of courses—covering the high-demand areas of cybersecurity and business/personal finance—are slated to launch in the 2026-27 school year.
Education Week sat down with Coleman in his New York City office to talk about the career-focused initiative, the College Board’s response to AI, and how the organization is adjusting to the Trump administration’s bans on equity-focused curriculum.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
AI tools can pass almost every AP test. Are students taught what they need to know to thrive in a future workplace dominated by AI?
High schools had a crisis of relevance far before AI.
How do we make high school relevant, engaging, and purposeful? Because [students] definitely don’t think it is. For many high students, high school curriculum is middle school, once more with feeling.
Bluntly, it takes [the] next generation of coursework. We are reconsidering the kinds of courses we offer.
College Board has previously partnered with higher education to create courses. Will you now be partnering with employers/industry?
What we are doing is giving employers an equal voice.
So, an example of a new partner [in course design] is the [U.S.] Chamber of Commerce. What’s cool about what we’ll do with business or cybersecurity is that it will simultaneously get you college credit at institutions that offer it and get you that workforce credential. [After successfully completing] AP Cybersecurity, you could definitely get some really good jobs and be qualified for them.
After business and cybersecurity, what sector is next on your list?
I think the next breakthrough is going to be health care.
What we’re wondering about is—you have a year of chemistry, and you teach organic biology [separately]. But if you ever want to do health care, you need to know how chemistry works in the body, the mechanism of action of drugs, and other interventions. You need to know the dynamic systems and how chemicals work. Why don’t we do an integrated course? [Could] kids learn [these topics] simultaneously in course on anatomy and physiology and careers in the health sciences?
Employers want their employees to have tricky-to-measure skills, like creativity, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. Is that something you are trying to capture as well?
The biggest move we are making [in that direction] is in a course called [AP] Seminar. Since there’s less required content, that’s a course where you can develop routines around really building these durable skills. In the seminar course, you must work individually and in teams. You are graded on collaboration as part of your project-level work. So, it’s woven into the AP score.
[Our business and personal finance course] has a heavy emphasis on entrepreneurship and responding to change. [Students] study flexibility, adaptation, and resourcefulness, because there’s no way to know exactly how [new technologies like] AI will operate.
So how do you measure something like resourcefulness?
Just to give you an example … In the business course, every student needs to make a business plan and share it and have a competition [around] it. And they have to act as a financial adviser to a family similar or different than their own. With those two projects, you can test students for their ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
Speaking of technology, could a student use AI to write a paper for their AP Seminar class?
What we definitely are thinking about is, “How can students skillfully use AI without replacing their own skills development? How can you use AI resourcefully and powerfully without it totally eclipsing what you’re trying to get kids to learn?”
[In AP Seminar], the project-based work is scored, so in the projects, students might [at some point] artfully use AI and might be judged on whether they’ve effectively used it to advance their work. But the [timed test portion of the] assessment gives us the counterbalance [and would not be an appropriate place to use AI].
I think that interplay is essential for advancement in the AI world. We always want the check and balance of what can you do with it and what can you do without it, to see what you’re gaining separately from [the course].
Is the College Board considering training teachers on AI? Cybersecurity?
One dark path I see is the fantasy that the machine will replace the teacher. In other words, that with AI, with all this new online coursework, we suddenly don’t need teachers.
Teachers recruit kids who did not believe that they could do [rigorous academic work]. They give feedback and encouragement daily. It is just foolish to condense teaching to the transmission portion of the teaching job.
So sure, someday we could get wonderful lectures and tutoring through AI. But not the encouragement, support, and engagement that a teacher does in responding to humans in front of him or her.
For our AP computer science principles course, 52 percent of the teachers are from outside the discipline of computer science, but we give them the summer training, we give them daily exercises for the kids, and they can teach that course. [The College Board is planning something similar for cybersecurity.]
I’m not saying [teachers will] be experts in cyber. I’m saying they’ll know enough about the structure of the cyber course and its beginnings and the resources for students that they’ll be able to stay a step ahead of their kids. Unless we’re willing to massively invest in teachers learning ahead of their students in this way, we will never catch up to [industry needs in this area].
We’re willing to invest a lot to make sure teachers get the confidence [using AI within the context of the discipline they teach in.]
How are you making sure your courses—particularly the career-readiness ones that include an AI component—stay up to date?
It used to be there that there was this inalterable thing called the course framework. But in this environment, there’ll be a more living portion of these courses. [For instance], the way they intersect with AI will be updated much more frequently, considered annually, is how we’re thinking about it.
Might the College Board create an AP Data Science course?
It [is] undoubtedly true that many more kids mastering calculus and getting a math credit in high school through precalculus helps them a lot. But at the same time learning skills of data analysis is eminently useful. So how do you balance those two?
The new verbal section of the SAT includes charts. To be literate, to really read broadly, unless you’re gonna just read fiction, you can’t skip over the tables in a science article or skip over data and information.
[AP Computer Science Principles] is really a course in data and computer science. [Students can use the class’s project component] to dig into data science. We need to be more innovative, rather than adding stuff, trying to find a way [incorporate certain concepts] into what we’re already doing.
We have or will be removing the Algebra II requirement for AP Statistics.
I’m super excited that with this change in statistics, that we’ll have a lot more kids who are bored of more abstract math getting really into math through statistics. Then more of them might also do calculus.
What are your plans for courses like AP African American Studies, given the Trump administration’s directive that schools avoid teaching “discriminatory equity ideology” or risk federal funding?
We’re going to stand by what I think is a beautiful and amazing course for all types of kids. The African American Studies course does not just do history—it does history, literature and the arts. For most people taking this course, it’s a bonanza of learning things they didn’t know. It’s a fascinating course to most young people. Twenty-nine percent of the students in the course, this is their first AP course, which matters a great deal to us.
It’s a choice for every parent and family whether they want to take the course. It’s a choice for every school whether to offer it. It’s a choice of every state whether they want to offer it. That’s their choice. But we’re not changing it. There’s a lot of local flexibility, but the required content [will remain the same as before the executive order].
