For decades, the College Board partnered with college and universities to design courses for its sprawling Advanced Placement program, which is offered at about 16,000 high schools, making it the most widespread vehicle for bringing college-level expectations to high school classrooms.
Now the nonprofit is putting a new twist on AP: It is crafting courses not just with higher education at the table, but industry partners such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the technology giant IBM.
The organization hopes the effort will make high school content more meaningful to students by connecting it to in-demand job skills.
It believes the approach may entice a new kind of AP student: those who may not be immediately college-bound.
The effort may also help the College Board—founded more than a century ago—maintain AP’s prominence as artificial intelligence tools that can already ace nearly every existing AP test on an ever-greater share of job tasks once performed by humans.
“High schools had a crisis of relevance far before AI,” David Coleman, the CEO of the College Board, said in a wide-ranging interview with EdWeek last month. “How do we make high school relevant, engaging, and purposeful? Bluntly, it takes [the] next generation of coursework. We are reconsidering the kinds of courses we offer.”
The first two classes developed through this career-driven model—dubbed AP Career Kickstart—focus on cybersecurity and business principles/personal finance, two fast-growing areas in the workforce.
Students who enroll in the courses and excel on a capstone assessment could earn college credit in high school, just as they have for years with traditional AP courses in subjects like chemistry and literature.
However, the College Board also believes that students could use success in the courses as a selling point with potential employers.
“Our aim is to have employers recognize the value of [the coursework], when you’re applying to internships or apprenticeships or when you’re on the job,” Coleman said.
New AP course aims to equip students with real-world business skills
That’s a goal shared by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is helping to shape the business principles course.
“This course is going to give people a leg up both when they’re applying for jobs, and then once they get the job, whether they have a college degree or whether they’ve gone straight in into the workforce, because they’ll just have a basic understanding of how businesses in general operate,” Neil Bradley, an executive vice president and chief policy officer at the chamber, said. “Those are skills that can be taken to virtually any workplace and would be found valuable.”
For instance, the course could be worthwhile for a student who wants to pursue a career in welding—a job that may not require a four-year degree—and hopes to open their own welding shop down the line.
The student will need to understand concepts like profit margins and return on investment, Bradley said.
That’s something many students aren’t exposed to unless they major in business at a four-year college, he said.
“College is always going to be valuable, full stop. But it’s also true that we’re never going to have 100 percent of kids going to college, and nor should we want to,” Bradley said.
This kind of deep collaboration is a first for many businesses, which aren’t typically at the table giving detailed input on course content, said Carol Kim, the director of technology, data and AI at IBM.
“It’s a really good way for corporations and companies to help shape the curriculum and the future workforce,” Kim said. “That’s where I find a lot of the value, is letting them know what we’re looking for.”
Both the business and cybersecurity courses could also help fulfill state high school graduation requirements for computer science education (currently in place in at least 11 states) and financial literacy (on the books in more than half of states).
College Board expands AP to bridge higher ed. and career training
These career-minded courses developed with industry partners align with the College Board’s long-standing work with higher education, Coleman said. The organization will continue to collaborate with colleges to craft course content.
“It’s not a pivot because it’s not to the exclusion of higher ed,” Coleman said. “What we are doing is giving employers an equal voice.”
Still, the College Board’s move comes as the public increasingly questions the value of a traditional four-year college degree.
A plurality of adults—49 percent—believe a four-year degree is less important in getting a well-paid job than it was 20 years ago, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey.
College Board’s move could help break down longstanding barriers between college-bound students and those in career-and-technical education, said Adrianna Harrington, the managing director for policy at ExcelinEd, a nonprofit working with College Board on the initiative.
“We felt by having it powered by AP, it provided a rigor and a clout to traditional career and technical education courses,” she said.
For years, policymakers and educators have been trying to “shift the narrative into, every student is on a [career] pathway, as opposed to CTE being over here and Gen. Ed. being separate. Having AP feed into that feels like a really natural and important step.”
Work-based learning is key to making AP career courses meaningful
Lazaro Lopez, the associate superintendent for teaching and learning in Township High School District 214 outside Chicago agreed that the College Board’s move is a clear signal to the K-12 field that “career-focused learning is rigorous, it’s valuable, and it deserves the same recognition as traditional academic pathways.”
But Lopez pointed out that the idea is hardly novel.
For over a decade, Lopez—a 2025 Education Week Leader to Learn From—has led an effort in his district to make high school more relevant by offering dozens of career pathways. Though District 214 was on the early end of this trend, such pathway programs are now a fixture in high schools nationwide.
In Lopez’s district, many pathways include college-level coursework, including AP classes. For instance, the district encourages students in its business pathway to take AP Economics, and steers those in its political science pathway to AP Government and Politics.
But for Lopez, those classes take on far more meaning when paired with another key component of District 214’s pathways: work-based learning experiences, including job shadowing, internships, and apprenticeships.
Lopez said local schools would need to integrate those experiences into the Kickstart courses to maximize career-connected learning.
“The caveat with all of this is that it can’t become this other academic track that’s just AP,” Lopez said. “It can’t replace any hands-on experiences that prepare students for college and careers, because [that’s what leads] to that level of engagement and depth of relevance for the students.”
He also noted that some pathways his district offers require materials and workspaces that the College Board alone can’t provide, such as health care labs and manufacturing equipment.
“Part of what makes our programs successful is the equipment and facilities we have,” Lopez said. “It opens the aspirations of the students because they’re seeing it there in their school. They see this health care lab, they’re seeing the nurse who’s teaching them, and they start to envision that they fit in that space. It really does have an impact.”
In response to such concerns, Holly Stepp, a spokeswoman for the College Board, said that the courses are designed to serve as a “nationwide standard, which can be exceedingly beneficial for districts that lack resources to provide a diverse range of career and technical education programs.”
She added that work in the courses is “designed to be hands-on and lean into project based learning.”
Lopez also wondered, “how are these courses going to be received and recognized by higher ed.?”
While for years colleges gave credit to students who got a passing score on AP courses—typically at least a 3 out of a possible 5—postsecondary institutions have been slower to embrace the College Board’s newer courses, including AP Seminar.
AP Seminar was designed to help students develop the collaboration, research, and writing skills that they would need for a range of college majors, according to the College Board’s website.
Given that, colleges typically don’t award credit for success in the course. Those that do consider it a general elective.
It is “still early in the process for securing credit policies for the new courses,” Stepp said. She added that work begins once the course frameworks are finalized.
Cybersecurity course will prepare students for high-demand field
The cybersecurity course is being piloted in 200 schools this school year and is expected to expand to 800 schools next school year.
For now, students in the cybersecurity pilot who earn a passing score on the course assessment can earn a voucher for test preparation and exam fees for the CompTIA exam, an industry-recognized assessment.
Successfully completing the CompTIA exam signals to postsecondary institutions—and potential employers—that a student has the skills to perform job-related tasks, such as monitoring a network’s performance and troubleshooting security infrastructure.
Students with cybersecurity skills aren’t likely to lack job opportunities, Kim noted. In fact, the World Economic Forum, an international advocacy and research organization, projects a global shortage of 85 million cybersecurity workers by 2030.
Kim sees cybersecurity skills as applicable to a wide range of sectors. “It just interacts with so many things, whether it be social, economic, or political,” she said. Cybersecurity experts “safeguard our networks, our data. They protect our communities in this interconnected world.”
The College Board will also have to stay a step ahead of rapidly evolving technology, including AI, which will play a growing role in cybersecurity coursework, Kim said.
Coleman agreed. “There’ll be a more living portion of these courses,” he said. The way courses like cybersecurity “intersect with AI will be updated much more frequently,” potentially annually.
AP business course focuses on real-world skills, soft skills, and future health care integration
Students in the business principles/personal finance class will work in teams to develop a business plan and simulate the role of a financial adviser for households with varying income levels and goals.
There are no pilots planned for the course, but the College Board is field testing the coursework this school year and next. An exam will be part of the class when it launches nationwide in the 2026-27 school year.
To be sure, in addition to wanting employees who understand key business terms and strategies, employers are also seeking workers who possess a range of so-called soft skills, such as empathetic listening, persistence, and self-awareness. Such capabilities, though, are notoriously difficult to assess and measure on a standardized test.
The College Board and the chamber, however, believe that those skills will be embedded in the project-based work students will complete for the course, including working in teams to create a business plan.
“You’re going to develop those soft skills, because you’re practicing them,” as part of the course material, Bradley said.
Looking ahead, the College Board might expand the Kickstart program.
One possibility: A health care course.
“I think the next breakthrough is going to be health care,” Coleman said. Students tend to study biology and chemistry separately. But “if you ever want to do health care, you need to know how chemistry works in the body. … Why don’t we do an integrated course? [Could] kids learn [these topics] simultaneously in a great course on anatomy and physiology and careers in the health sciences?”
Teacher training is key to meeting cybersecurity workforce demands
The Kickstart initiative will require significant teacher training—particularly for the cybersecurity course. Cybersecurity skills, already too rare in the job market to meet employers’ needs, are even scarcer among the nation’s teaching force.
Complicating matters: If a teacher has the know-how to get a job in cybersecurity, they likely already have the skills to work in a higher-paying profession than K-12 education.
So, the College Board is planning to invest heavily in training K-12 teachers to lead the cybersecurity course. The model has already shown success with AP Computer Science Principles, the program’s introductory computer science course.
Slightly more than half of the teachers who lead that class have backgrounds in subjects other than computer science, Coleman said. But those coming from other disciplines have completed summer training programs that enabled them to teach the class, which includes a requirement that students complete a coding project.
College Board is hoping for a similar result in sponsoring cybersecurity training.
“I’m not saying [these teachers will] be experts in cyber” by the end of their training, Coleman said. “I’m saying they’ll know enough about the structure of the cyber course and have the resources that they’ll be able to stay a step ahead of their kids.”
This kind of concerted effort is necessary to get students ready for the future job market, Coleman said.
“Unless we’re willing to massively invest in teachers learning ahead of their students, we will never catch up” to workforce needs.
