Aged Upstart, College Board, Is Joining Gold Rush on Web

September 25, 1999

Aged Upstart, College Board, Is Joining Gold Rush on Web

By JODI WILGOREN
nder threat by the rapidly growing on-line industry that helps students prepare for and select colleges, the College Board, the nonprofit organization that administers the SAT, voted on Friday to create its first-ever for-profit subsidiary in a move to establish a flashy full-service Web site of its own.
The unanimous vote of the College Board's 24 trustees is a radical shift for a staid 100-year-old group best known as the objective overseer of college-entrance exams, thrusting an institution honored for its dispassionate conservatism into the big-money world of Internet start-ups. It follows a spate of new advertisement-driven on-line ventures -- including an upgrade just this week of the Princeton Review's Web site -- focusing on the lucrative high-school and college market, a trend that has raised concerns about the commercialization of education.
"We're not willing to give up our not-for-profit expertise to somebody who's just in it for the money," said Gaston Caperton, who took over as president of the College Board in July. "We have the right values. We have the right goals. What we have to do is have the right capital and expertise to compete."
The plan for a Web site to cater to a college applicants' every need, from financial aid forms to SAT tutoring, marks the convergence of two major trends in education in the 1990's: the expansion of for-profit enterprises and the explosion of electronic endeavors.
"We're living in a world of piranha economics in regard to education," said Arthur Levine, a scholar of higher education who is president of Teacher's College at Columbia University. "Every Wall Street firm, seemingly, has an education department. Venture capitalists are moving into this very quickly. Any nonprofit that fails to recognize both the opportunities and the challenges that come from the digital world is destined for extinction."
While most experts, including Levine, admired the College Board for diving into a wave they see as inevitable, some said the new venture presents a conflict of interest. The plan calls for Caperton to serve as the new company's chief executive, and the trustees to retain majority-control of its board.
Instead of a pure educational mission, the organization would now have the added motivation of money. That means trying to sell products to students lured to the site, say, to register for the Scholastic Assessment Tests, with the knowledge that a successful Web site could eventually go public and make everybody involved rich.
Caperton said it had to be a for-profit subsidiary in order to entice the $10 million he has lined up in initial investments, and to attract technological talent in a sphere where stock options are essential to any job offer. But critics were more cynical.
"What they're doing is drawing on their reputation and the institutional endorsement they've had over the years and using that to turn a dollar," said Scott Rice, an professor of English at San Jose State University who is writing a book about the influence of money in education.
"A testing agency should be purer than Caesar's wife. That's hardly the case if they're going to enter the marketplace."
The plan's Web site, www.collegeboard.com, would offer free or low-cost tutoring for the tests the College Board sponsors and guidance in navigating the admissions process. It would be financed in part by advertisers selling computers, cars and credit cards, with commercial links, for everything from opening a bank account to buying and selling dorm-room furniture. Eventually, Caperton believes the new site could be used to train teachers for Advanced Placement courses, or even to teach those classes to students in schools where they are not available.
The new venture comes on the heels of the most competitive college-admission season in history, and will join a flourishing cyber-crowd -- including test-preparation giants like the Princeton Review and Stanley Kaplan, which are seeking to cater to that throng. In addition to www.kaplan.com and www.review.com, collegeboard.com will also compete with CollegeQuest.com, embark.com and CollegeNet.com, all Web sites trying to serve as a kind of electronic guidance counselor holding students' hands through the college-selection process -- and making money along the way.
"Whether it's student loans, or computers, a lot of people are starting up these sites because advertisers want to reach these kids," said John Katzman, president of the Princeton Review, whose site charges colleges $2,000 to post their sales pitches, and plans eventually to offer $800 test-preparation courses on line.
In a similar trend, some 500 colleges and universities have contracted with a new company, Campus Pipeline, to run Web sites, complete with advertising, on their behalf. And Harvard University is considering five paths it could pursue in cyberspace, including a harvard.com venture that would seek to exploit the university's prestigious name for profit.
The College Board's current Web site, www.collegeboard.org, gets about 50 million hits a month, officials said, and if current trends hold, on-line registration for the Oct. 9 Scholastic Assessment Tests will attract about one million students, or one out of every three test takers.
But the current College Board site, which will remain active for guidance counselors and admissions officers, and already links viewers to the .com address, is "old-fashioned," Caperton said.

The new venture is a somewhat natural brainchild for Caperton, the former Governor of West Virginia, whose political legacy was bringing computers to his state's impoverished schools.
But it is a departure for the College Board, a membership organization of some 3,300 schools and institutions that meets its $250 million budget mainly through test-registration fees, dues, and sales of books of practice exams.

But Jonathan Zittrain, executive director of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University, said nonprofit educational organizations would be going down the wrong road if they tried to compete with Silicon Valley.
"The caution for them," Zittrain said, "is if it isn't your core mission, you're going to get eaten alive by someone for whom it is."

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