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Italian AP Exam is Reinstated

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A week after her brother Andrew Cuomo was elected governor of New York, Dr. Margaret Cuomo was victorious in her multi-year struggle to have the College Board reinstate the Italian AP Exam, the “Wall Street Journal” reported.

In the four years that the Italian AP exam was previously offered, it fell short of the College Board’s target of 5,000 test takers per year, and as a result, it ran losses of $1.5 million per year.  Echoing their 2003 contribution of $300,000 to get the College Board to initiate the Italian AP exam in the first place,  the Italian government has once again stepped up, this time agreeing to pay the College Board half the cost to have the exam reinstated, provided the other half would be covered by Italian heritage groups, the Journal reported.

Since I blogged about the Italian AP exam back in May of this year, the College Board, which is a not-for-profit organization, has reported improved financial results. For the fiscal year ended 6/30/2009, the College Board’s revenue exceeding expenses by $53 million, with revenue of $623 million, and expenses of $570 million.  For the fiscal year ended 6/30/2008, revenue exceeded expense by $39 million.

Will Italian AP Exam be Reinstated?

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The “Wall Street Journal” reported that Margaret Cuomo, sister of NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, is leading efforts to get the College Board to reinstate the Italian Advanced Placement, or AP exam, which it announced (in January, 2009) would be cut, “due to low numbers and financial losses.”

The College Board, or more formally the College Entrance Examination Board, is a not-for-profit organization representing 5,700 colleges whose mission statement reads as follow:  “To connect students to college success and opportunity. We are a not-for-profit membership organization committed to excellence and equity in education.”

According to a College Board spokeswoman, the Italian AP exam incurred cumulative losses of $1.5 million for the four years it was offered, the “WSJ” reported.  The number of students who took the exam was 1,600 in 2006, the first year it was offered, growing to 2,300 in its final year, but still short of the College Board’s target of 5,000 student test takers per year.  By way of comparison, in addition to the widely-taken Standard Achievement Test, or SAT, the College Board offers advanced placement tests.  Spanish is the most widely taken language AP test, with over 110,000 test takers in 2009.

The College Board charges students $86 to take an AP exam, so doing the math, and assuming that there were a total of 8,000 Italian AP exams administered over the four year period, it would seem that the College Board has pegged the four-year cost for the Italian AP program at approximately $2.2 million, or around $275 per exam administered.

It is hard not to be cynical about the decision to drop the Italian AP exam given the organization’s ample profits and investments.  The College Board’s 990 statement, which is available at Guidestar.org shows that for the fiscal year ended 6/30/2008, the non-profit College Board had revenues of $621 million, which exceeded expenses of $582 million by more than $39 million.

If the College Board had somehow come up with a way to cut back just 2% on the $17 million it spent for travel and the $10.7 million for “conferences, conventions and meetings” it could have used those savings to fund the loss incurred by the Italian AP exam.

Or looked at another way, the annual loss on the Italian AP exam was less than 1/10 of 1% of The College Board’s combined cash on hand of nearly $58 million, and investments in securities of $317 million as of 6/30/2008.  Why exactly does a not-for-profit need to have $317 million of investment in securities and how is the College Board using those funds to advance its mission?

Maria Costa, an Italian teacher at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School who had 44 students take the Italian AP exam last year called the situation a “bad soap opera,” the “WSJ” reported.  “In the end, it’s the kids who pay the price,” said Ms. Costa.