College Board Goes Global: How a U.S. Test Became the World’s Favorite Anxiety Export
College Board: The Great American Sorting Hat Goes Global
By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, Somewhere Over the Atlantic
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if Kafka and Milton Friedman co-designed a dating app for 17-year-olds, look no further than the College Board: a 123-year-old non-profit whose primary export is anxiety, laminated in four-hour increments. Originally cooked up in 1900 to standardize college admissions for a few tweedy East-Coast gents, the outfit has since metastasized into a trans-national rite of passage. Today, from Manila cram schools to Lagos midnight Zoom classes, the SAT, AP, and PSAT logos flicker on screens like the Visa sign outside an airport currency exchange—comforting, seductive, and quietly predatory.
The basic pitch is endearingly simple: one multiple-choice oracle will separate wheat from chaff, future hedge-fund analysts from future baristas. In practice, the algorithm is less Oracle of Delphi and more airport security line—long, arbitrary, and disproportionately fond of confiscating liquids from the poor. Wealthy Seoul families hire $400-an-hour “diagnostic consultants.” In São Paulo, bilingual tutors charge in dollars because inflation-proofing is a lifestyle. Meanwhile, rural Uttar Pradesh students huddle around cracked Android phones praying the power doesn’t cut out mid-mock test. Equal opportunity, meet unequal Wi-Fi.
The College Board insists it is merely a neutral scorekeeper, the Switzerland of scholastic sorting. This claim holds about as much water as a chocolate teapot. Critics note that the SAT’s arcane vocabulary (“lachrymose,” “perspicacious”) correlates less with college success than with parental income. The Board’s response? Retool the test, add an “adversity score,” then quietly sunset it after discovering that labeling teenagers with hardship stickers makes everyone—especially admission officers at Duke—feel icky. Nothing says “progress” like a metrics firm that treats socioeconomic reality as a bug report.
Still, the numbers are magnificent. Roughly 2.2 million students sit for the SAT each year; another 5 million chase Advanced Placement credits like Pokémon cards with GPA multipliers. That’s a user base the size of Ireland, generating $1.1 billion in annual revenue for an organization that still enjoys tax-exempt status by claiming to “expand access to higher education.” Somewhere, PT Barnum is applauding politely.
The ripple effects travel farther than most American soft power. Chinese agents once flew to Iowa test centers to harvest answer sheets for resale on the black market. Saudi prep academies now import retired U.S. proctors the way Premier League teams import aging strikers. In Ghana, “SAT boot camps” run on diesel generators because the national grid can’t be trusted to deliver the precise 65-minute reading sections required for global benchmarking. Nothing says 21st-century meritocracy like children sweating through geometry proofs by lantern light.
Europe, ever the snobbish older cousin, pretends to be above the fray. Yet even Oxford and Cambridge—bastions of tweed and inherited privilege—now accept SAT scores from international applicants who can’t sit for A-levels because their home country canceled exams during, say, a military coup. The Board markets this as “flexibility.” One might also call it opportunistic insurance against geopolitical turbulence, but that would be cynical.
Which brings us to the existential punchline: the entire exercise may soon be moot. More than 1,800 U.S. colleges have gone “test-optional” since the pandemic, proving that when the proctoring software crashes, the Ivy League can improvise like jazz musicians at a wake. Yet the Board has pivoted gamely—selling “digital” SATs, hawking data dashboards to universities, and licensing personality quizzes that promise to quantify “grit” for admissions offices too lazy to read essays. There’s always another revenue stream in the landfill of teenage self-esteem.
The global takeaway? College Board has perfected the art of monetizing hope while appearing to democratize it. In that sense, it is the perfect American institution: equal parts merit myth, market efficiency, and moral sleight-of-hand. Somewhere tonight, a 16-year-old in Jakarta will fall asleep clutching an SAT prep book like a talisman against an uncertain future. The book was printed in China, shipped via Singapore, and priced at $39.99. Shipping, as always, is extra.
