Dive Brief:
- College Board is expanding into career and technical education with courses that allow high school students nationwide to take career-oriented AP-equivalent courses.
- In the 2024-25 school year, the nonprofit behind Advanced Placement courses and the SAT launched its Career Kickstart program with two inaugural pilot courses for a cybersecurity pathway at two high schools in San Antonio. AP Networking Fundamentals and AP Cybersecurity Fundamentals are year-long courses that align with CTE standards and offer applied, hands-on learning that builds problem-solving skills.
- Research shows that CTE courses positively impact students’ high school completion, employability skills and college readiness. However, 28 states and territories reported CTE teacher shortages to the U.S. Department of Education in the 2023-24 school year, according to the Association for Career and Technical Education.
Dive Insight:
The Career Kickstart program is reimagining traditional CTE courses by developing these lessons to fit College Board’s framework for AP courses.
Similar to AP courses, students take an end-of-course exam. Those who earn a qualifying score on a cybersecurity pilot exam will earn a free voucher for additional test prep and the industry-recognized certification exam.
Cybersecurity is one of the fastest-growing fields in the U.S., which is why Career Kickstart is starting with this pathway. Between September 2023 and August 2024, there were over 457,000 cybersecurity job openings in the U.S., according to the CyberSeek, a cybersecurity job market data nonprofit.
Students can take Career Kickstart’s cybersecurity courses before, after or alongside AP Computer Science A or AP Computer Science Principles. While the courses are designed for schools’ CTE programs, they are not exclusively for CTE track or AP students.
To further assist students with career pathways, College Board also worked with researchers from the Human Resources Research Organization to map SAT Suite scores — which include scores for the SAT, PSAT/NMSQT, PSAT 10 and the PSAT 8/9 — to the occupational descriptors of jobs using the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network database, or O*NET. Through this resource, students will receive information about jobs they may be a good fit for based on their SAT scores.
Career Kickstart plans to launch multiple pathways across several career clusters — including informational technology, health science and business — over time, with a focus on pathways that “prepare students for high-demand, high-wage jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree.” In the meantime, a second round of cybersecurity pilots will launch for the 2025-26 school year.