“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.”
Coleman told Fortune in an interview that “it’s a dangerous moment” 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.”
Bradley told Fortune that it “quickly evolved into a deeper discussion about how we could bring together the best of what the College Board does in education and what the Chamber does in organizing the business community, with the full vision coming together at a meeting in the College Board’s New York offices in early 2025. In the spring, they had meetings in DC with nearly 100 state and local Chamber CEOs and launched a nationwide initiative.
“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.”
Coleman called the “segregation” that he sees taking place among different types of students “cruel, socially, in high schools. It literally separates students from other students in very unkind ways.” It’s also “really dumb,” he added, because all kinds of students need the new offering on business, which is designed both for students headed to college and for those planning to go directly into trades or work, reflecting a changing landscape where career success increasingly depends on adaptability, innovation, and financial literacy.
For years, Bradley told Fortune, 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.
Both leaders are betting that a relevant, applied course that offers college credit and real employability will ignite engagement among students hungry for autonomy and economic power. “They seem to be hungry for this,” Coleman said, commenting on how entrepreneurial he believes the current crop of high-school students are, citing interest in steady blue-collar, middle-class jobs like 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.”
Bradley said many 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.”
When asked to describe this in more detail, Bradley said that it’s not a new story, but one persisting for several years: “People are putting so much pressure on work to fulfill [many different] things” for them. He said the College Board was seeing similar pressures, and they quickly agreed there was an opening at the high-school level to try to fix this.
“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.”
