David Coleman is more than just the College Board's CEO; he's a genuine education advocate, per Time magazine. Upon assuming leadership of the organization 12 years ago, responsible for The Advanced Placement (AP) program and SAT college entrance exams, he informed Coins2Day that affluent students were succeeding while others were disadvantaged.
TL;DR
- College Board CEO David Coleman advocates for education reform, addressing disadvantages for non-affluent students.
- Coleman and U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Suzanne Clark collaborate on AP program reform.
- A new AP Business with Personal Finance course will debut, endorsed by numerous companies and chambers.
- The initiative aims to bridge the gap between career and general education, preparing students for the workforce.
“When I started at the College Board, we only gave the SAT over the weekend,” he said. “And that may sound fine, but the kid who self-selects to take an exam over the weekend is a certain sort of kid.” AP courses were no different, he said, “focused on a fairly narrow set of the top 20% to 30% of the high school.”
The College Board’s own research suggests that “AP students tend to be from higher-income families, attend suburban schools, and have better academic preparation for high school” more than students who opt out of AP courses and tests.
Coleman stated in an interview with Coins2Day that “it’s a dangerous moment” is crucial for education. “The biggest fact of the American high school is that our kids are more and more disconnected than ever before from the whole enterprise of pursuing their future.”
Coleman described a downward spiral of worsening engagement with instruction in general. “In elementary school, they’ll take what we give them. In middle school, they become suspicious. And in high school, many of them are done. And they’re just not taking it. They’re not interested.”
The College Board CEO said this could get even worse in the age of artificial intelligence, describing his fears of a “why bother?” Mentality taking hold. His remarks come in a climate when top CEOs are revealing that they’re having the same conversations around their kitchen tables. Just a few weeks ago, Ford CEO Jim Farley revealed a story about his own son working a mechanic job last summer and wondering aloud: “I don’t know why I need to go to college.”
Coleman stated he then received a call from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce near the end of 2024. He mentioned that upon meeting with The Chamber's CEO, Suzanne Clark, and its Chief Policy Officer, Neil Bradley, it became apparent they both encountered the same issue from distinct viewpoints and were prepared to make a “far bolder move” in reforming the AP program.
Bradley informed Coins2Day that the concept "rapidly developed into a more profound conversation regarding how we could unite the strengths of the College Board's educational contributions with The Chamber's expertise in business community organization, culminating in a comprehensive vision at a gathering held at the College Board's New York headquarters in early 2025. During the spring, they convened in DC for discussions with approximately 100 state and local Chamber chief executive officers, subsequently initiating a national effort."
This fall, a completely new course will debut: AP Business with Personal Finance. Achieving mastery in this program will earn recognition from numerous employers, potentially paving the way for immediate job placement or further education. Close to 300 companies, such as Aon, IBM, Nissan, SnapIT Solutions, and Wells Fargo, alongside 75 local chambers of commerce spanning over 40 states, have given their approval to the new AP courses.
“We’re really saying this is something of value to almost all kids, that it’s a different thing, that we’ve got to stop it with a few kids getting the good stuff.” Coleman’s goal is ambitious: “that fundamental division between career education and general education must fall.”
How to end segregation?
Coleman referred to the “segregation” he observes occurring across various student demographics “cruel, socially, in high schools. It literally separates students from other students in very unkind ways.” He also stated, it's “really dumb,” because all student groups require the recently introduced business curriculum, intended for both those pursuing higher education and individuals entering trades or the workforce immediately. This reflects an evolving environment where career achievement is more reliant on flexibility, creativity, and financial understanding.
Bradley stated that, from The Chamber's viewpoint, businesses are utterly fed up with struggling to find qualified workers. The Chamber's president and CEO, Suzanne Clark, remarked on the news of the new course, “We hear from business leaders all the time—they cannot find the talent. This course is about preparing students for day one of their first job and helping them see enterprise as a source of opportunity and growth.”
For years, Bradley told Coins2Day, Chamber members voiced frustration about the lack of readiness among young workers—a problem exacerbated by technological change and the rise of AI. “We’ve heard for a long time from [members], we’ve had concerns … that we wonder what particularly students are learning about business and our free-enterprise system.” Bradley noted that tradespeople—from welders to electricians—often aspire to one day run their own businesses and need business acumen just as much as future accountants or MBAs.
The two officials are wagering that a practical, pertinent curriculum granting college credit and genuine job prospects will spark interest in students eager for independence and financial control. “They seem to be hungry for this,” Coleman remarked, discussing his perception of the current high-schoolers' entrepreneurial spirit, noting their desire for stable, middle-class careers in fields such as healthcare and nursing. “They’re most interested in business because they want to make money and thrive. And they’re very realistic about that, but we’re not giving it to them.”
What are students truly grasping regarding free enterprise?
Bradley stated that a significant number of Chamber members are “just grappling with the different ways that people want to work and are willing to work and how they show up, particularly as employers were figuring out kind of the post-COVID hybrid back-in-office kind of environment.”
Bradley explained that this isn't a novel issue but one that has been ongoing for several years: “People are putting so much pressure on work to fulfill [many different] things” for them. He mentioned that the College Board was experiencing comparable pressures, and they readily acknowledged an opportunity at the high-school level to address this.
“We quickly realized we were trying to solve the same problem from different sides,” Bradley explained, noting their joint effort will send “market signals” that successful completion of the AP business course will be rewarded with endorsements from thousands of employers nationwide. This grows out of separate initiatives from the Chamber, Bradley added, mentioning the Grow with CO platform established five to six years ago, offering free online advice about how to start, run and grow a business. (CO is the U.S. Chamber’s digital platform for small business, dedicated to helping business owners across the U.S. Start, run, and grow successful companies.) He also cited the popularity of Chamber articles around business advice, such as the different between a partnership and an LLC, understanding profit and loss statements, and where to go for credit.
“You can have the best idea in the world, but you’ve still got to understand how to form your business, how to understand what your profit and loss are, and how to manage those things,” Bradley said. “And if we can give people an introduction to that in high school, I think it can make a really meaningful difference on people’s entrepreneurial trajectory, whether that’s in the trades or in something else.”
Gen Z is bowling alone
Bradley resists calling the lack of business and finance education a “crisis,” but recognizes its deep personal impact on individual graduates entering the workforce unprepared. Noting that roughly a third of high-school graduates don’t go on into higher education (a rate that has stayed very consistent, per the National Center for Education Statistics), it should be a “realistic expectation” that high school prepares them to find a job, “and that’s just not true in a lot of places today.” (In his September press conference, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell commented on the difficulties in entry-level hiring, calling it a “low-hiring, low-firing” environment.)
The Chamber's 2025 New Hire Readiness Report actually indicates that 84% of those responsible for hiring feel that current high school graduates aren't prepared for employment, with 80% stating that recent hires are less equipped than those who came before them. In the statement released regarding the new AP course, Clark also referenced a Gallup poll revealing that just 54% of Americans currently view capitalism favorably, marking the lowest figure ever recorded.
Meanwhile, a separate Gallup poll, the American Job Quality Study, found widespread worker dissatisfaction with what the economy is providing, as 60% of U.S. Workers overall are not in “quality jobs.” There appears to be a direct link, in this data and increasing numbers of analyses among social scientists, to dissatisfaction with work and a wider malaise in American society.
On a press call about the American Jobs Quality Survey, Gallup senior partner Stephanie Marken responded to a Coins2Day question about dissatisfaction specifically among recent graduates. She said 40 years of data indicates there really is something different about Gen Z, which is “looking for different things from their employers … we do see that Gen Z in particular is looking for something very different from their employer population.” Often, she added, they’re looking for mental health and work-life balance considerations in an outsized way compared to what decades of data show about millennials as they entered and participated in the workforce.
Bradley cited the classic work of sociology, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, with the memorable thesis that Americans were turning away from community. He said he largely agreed with the thesis that prior generations found personal fulfillment in lots of things or various things beyond their place of employment, such as going to church, belonging to a civic organization, even being in a bowling league. But that has stopped, “and therefore they try to put all of their personal validation in the place of business. They’re asking for their employer to be something beyond what their employer has traditionally been. I think that’s really hard.”