Please remember that the College Board is a nonprofit.
But Mercedes Schneider reminds us that the people who work at this nonprofit make a lot of money.
If you scan the list of executive salaries, you might begin to understand why the SAT is so expensive to consumers.
And you might cheer on the FairTest list of more than 1,000 colleges and universities that have become “test-optional,” because they recognize that a student’s score on the SAT or the ACT is less valuable as a predictor of college success than the same student’s four-year grade point average.
Schneider reviewed the College Board’s most recent tax filings.
She calls it a “lucrative racket.”
Total revenue in 2016 was $916M, just shy of one billion dollars, $3.3M of which derived from government grants. The greatest revenue generator was “AP and instruction,” at $446M, followed by “assessments,” at $338M.
As for 2016 lobbying expenses: The College Board spent $2.3M (a drop in the billion-dollar bucket of its total revenue), with the following explanation:
The College Board contacts legislators and their staff to provide data and statistics on K-12 education and college admissions and to encourage them to support appropriations for education.
If your nonprofit breaks a billion in revenue, then $2M spent on lobbying becomes relatively nothing. In addition, “providing data and statistics” is probably far enough removed to be considered as not actively lobbying.
But let’s move on to the few who profit the most from nonprofit College Board.
The highest paid independent contractor by far was another testing entity, Educational Testing Services (ETS), at $359M.
Former Common Core “architect” and College Board president, David Coleman, drew $1.7M in total compensation in 2016, $512K of which is “bonus and incentive compensation.” Note that as of 2019, Coleman is no longer president and is “just CEO.” The person replacing Coleman in 2019 as president, Jeremy Singer, made $871K in total compensation in 2016 as chief operating officer.
Former Gates Foundation policy director, Stefanie Sanford, who left Gates in December 2012 for chief of policy at College Board, pulled $597K in total compensation in 2016.
Then she has a fairly long list of other well-paid executives who do the significant work of the College Board.
See, if you teach students, you don’t earn much, but if you test them, you can drive a Porsche.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This who can…teach
Those who can’t…run (for-profit) non-profits.
YES; they take over non-profits to make a personal profit — AND to gain growing power over telling everyone else how to do the job
Give them credit where credit is due!!! Not only is their scam very lucrative, it’s also long-standing. In fact, theirs is one of the longest standing of long-standing scams.
Imagine the snake-oil salesman. He sells his Ancient Egyptian Magic Formula for weight loss, baldness, erectile dysfunction, and making a fortune in real estate. Authorities determine that it does none of these things and threaten to arrest him. So our intrepid entrepreneur changes the name of the product to New Improved Magic Elixir Cancer Cure and Car Wax System. Repeat this a few times.
It measures general aptitude! (No, it doesn’t.)
OK then. It measures general achievement! (Uh, no it doesn’t.)
OK then. It predicts success in college! (Uh, not as well as high-school grades do.)
OK. It’s aligned with the Common Core! (You are kidding, right?)
I think I need some of that Egyptian stuff. Every time I lay tile on the vertical it falls to the ground. Must be erect tile dysfunction.
What I really need is the ability to rive money off the billionaire tree with some worthless scam that sounds good. Then we could go camping and birdwatching all we want.
The College Board is perceived as a monopoly that is subsidized with federal and state funds. It was founded in 1900 and continues to exist because of Public Trust. Changing the narrative and educating the public about alternative predictors of college success will eventually be its downfall.
“Criticism of the College Board began to appear in the 1960s and 1970s; opponents of the SAT’s central role in college admissions charged that standardized tests were biased against minority students and students from underprivileged backgrounds. Several states in the first decade of the 21st century reduced their reliance on the SAT and chose instead to guarantee admission to students finishing in a set percentage at or near the top of their high-school graduating class.” (JohnJ.White ed.)
I guess that “The SAT measures success on the SAT and correlates really will with the wealth of students’ parents” never was a particularly good marketing line. LOL.
And the staying power of this test probably has a lot to do with the fact that it serves as a gateway, opening possibility to some and closing possibility to others. Some of us who did well on it then attain power, and so we take it seriously because it told people what good boys and girls we were, back in the day, and so we leave it in place despite its dubious merits.
Or at least that’s how things have worked in the past. A lot of colleges and universities have been wising up and dumping it because grades given by high-school teachers turn out to be better long-term predictors of college success.
“Please remember that the College Board is a nonprofit.
But Mercedes Schneider reminds us that the people who work at this nonprofit make a lot of money.”
The latter is a direct consequence of the former.
Nonprofits can’t show a profit and one way to deal with revenue and make sure that there is no profit on the books is through high salaries and bonuses.
Indeed. That six-figure salary that I nowhere near make as a 35-year teacher is starting salary for non-profiteers. Non-profit management has become the MBA for Millennials. The titles they give themselves are a hoot. —But their network is strong and has the attention of legislators. We gotta do better w/ reaching legislators.
Only a Porshe? How about an armored limo with their own personal driver and bodyguard?
I used to be a dairy farmer. You talk about a nonprofit. Now there was one.
LMAO!
“you can drive a Porsche.”
What does Coleman drive?
Does Coleman drive?
He probably has a driver and sits in the backseat of a limo with that smokey glass partition between him and the slave-wage driver behind the wheel.