Ursum Literary Magazine, Issue Nine, Spring 2021

34 A Letter To The College Board Dear College Board, You claim to be a nonprofit organization, asserted in your mission statement. In that, you also claim that you are “committed to excellence and equity in education.” The mission of your company is to provide fair education to all, yet I have to pay an unrealistic amount for exams that I’m not even sure I will pass. Your organization is gatekeeping higher education: you have monopolized the college preparation and application process, you have ruined learning for thousands of students around the world, and you have placed a price tag on our future.

Let’s consider my situation as a high school junior: I am currently taking AP Lang, AP U.S. History, and AP Calc BC. If I want to take the exams in May, I need to pay $99 for each, meaning a total of $297 for only three courses. Now let’s look at my high school experience in totality. By the end of my senior year I will have taken thirteen AP exams. This means that I will have had to pay around $1287 for just tests, which is a lot of money. Yes, this is a step down from the high cost of tuition, but with the competitiveness of college applications these days, you need to take AP classes to have a chance at a top school, so it is understandable to request that the price be decreased. You claim to provide equal educational opportunities for all, but if I want to challenge myself academically, the cost reaches into the thousands.

That isn’t even the end of it. According to College Vine, a website that offers insightful information about college applications, the average student applies to ten colleges, and it costs $15 to send your AP scores to each. If I were to apply to 10 schools like the average student, that means that I spend an additional $150 on my score reports, bringing the total up to $1437. This doesn’t even begin to include application fees that are specific to individual colleges and adds yet another cost to the college application process.

Let’s consider a scenario: Iin May, I get a 2 on my AP U.S. History Exam and decide I don’t want to send that score on my report to the colleges I’m applying to so that I can get the best possible chances at admission. If I want to leave this score out of my application, the fee is $10 per score, per college, totalling $100 just to leave it out of the report of the