AP (Advanced Placement) classes and AP exams have become a core part of many high schools. In 2024, about 3 million students—18% of American high schoolers—took AP exams. College Board states that AP students are “more likely to enroll in a 4-year college, compared to academically similar students who didn’t take AP,” and that students are “well prepared to succeed in introductory college coursework.” Students at Brighton High School tend to emphasize the second benefit. Sophomore Ryleigh Allen said that she thought the benefits were that AP classes give students “a good understanding of how college-level classes are and help you to be a better student.” Junior Kaitlyn Simon and senior Emilie Garcia also said similar things, noting their value as a way to get AP credit, with Simon adding that AP classes help students become “more confident in their testing abilities.” Additionally, all three said a main reason they chose to take an AP class was to have a more challenging experience. So, with AP testing recently finished, it makes one wonder how the United States ended up with this widespread system in the first place? The answer to that question, like a lot of things in modern American history, lies partially in the tensions and pressures of the Cold War. However, it’s first important to look at the U.S. post-World War II.
Post-War U.S. and Early Calls for Reform
During World War II, education shifted to focus more on mathematics alongside civic education in response to growing authoritarianism across the globe. These changes sparked debate after the war over how education should expand to keep the United States relevant on the global stage and protect democratic values. These ideas are reflected in a 1945 Harvard committee report, General Education in a Free Society, which aimed to explore “the present status of the American educational system” and consider how it can “both shape the future and secure the foundations of our free society.” While the report’s goals were lofty, it mainly focused on practical recommendations for improving education. One key proposal of the report was that while there should be common requirements for students, there also “must be courses of different difficulty and different method” and that students should be put in whatever course is best for them based on ability. The report’s justification for this need for separate courses based on ability was to avoid having “the quick and the slow be thrown helter-skelter together, the ones held back, the others forced beyond their speed and neither satisfied.” This suggestion, combined with the report’s observations of disconnect between high school and college curriculums, would lay the groundwork for another report that would lead to the AP program.
The 1952 Report, the Cold War and the Beginnings of AP
In 1952, Harvard published a report titled General Education in School and College, which advocated for colleges and high schools to work together to foster education and move talented students to and through college as fast as possible. One of the report’s main arguments was that the needs of talented youth had to be addressed in order to stay intellectually and technologically ahead of the Soviets in the Cold War. This report led to Phillips Academy, a prestigious private high school in Andover, Massachusetts, partnering with other private high schools along with universities like Harvard and Yale to begin a project to promote greater rigor in high school education. This project was sponsored by the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the Advancement of Education, which was created in 1951 to provide support and resources for educational reform. This project was initially called the “School and College Study of Admission with Advanced Standing.” Those running the AP program believed that the program could work “only in exceptional secondary schools, public and independent.” As such, in 1952, it was initially only offered in 18 particularly prestigious high schools, and the first year it ran, only 532 students took tests (as compared to today’s 3 million).
College Board’s Eternal Reign, Sputnik and the Growth of AP
In 1955, College Board took over the program and renamed it to the Advanced Placement program. Under the College Board, the program remained limited only to the most prestigious high schools, because, as the second director of the AP board put it, “the basic philosophy… is simply that all students are not created equal.” Then in 1957, the launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union caused the US government to panic and turned education into a national security concern. This new focus on outdoing the Soviets technologically, specifically manifested in the “Space Race,” led to a massive increase of investment into education through the 1958 National Defense Act. Though this act didn’t fund AP, the push helped spur the growth of the program. From 10,531 students in 1959, participation grew to 330,080 by 1989. Since then, the program has continued to grow up to the aforementioned 3 million students in 2024.
Old Worries, Modern Problems
In the 1960s, critics within the College Board noted that too much emphasis was being placed on the prestige value of AP courses, and viewing AP students as somehow elite or superior is dangerous. College Board already appeared to recognize that the way the program was evolving could be dangerous and that they should avoid turning it into purely a prestige symbol to provide privilege for students who take it. A lot has changed since the 1960s; the program has grown substantially, and in an attempt to keep people wanting to pay for AP courses, the College Board has changed up its tone. As stated at the start of this article, their website now advertises that students who take AP courses are “more likely to enroll in a 4-year college, compared to academically similar students who didn’t take AP.” This is a far cry from the warnings they were giving in the 1960s and shows how AP has changed in ways it wasn’t meant to.
In addition to this, AP classes tend to encourage students to specialize early and focus on a specific path in high school. Where AP classes were originally intended to offer students the opportunity to do more in-depth college-level work in high school, the focus on the goal of passing the AP exam to earn college credit has eroded this original goal in two ways. First, the focus on the May exams forces teachers, especially at schools like Brighton that start later, to have to rush through some of the material in order to get it all in before the test. The need to rush through all of the material, in many cases, makes it impossible for teachers or students to delve as deeply into the subject as they otherwise could and overall makes the AP experience more shallow.
The second issue is that many students take certain AP classes purely with the intent to avoid having to study the subject at all in college in order to have more ability to specialize in whatever specific subject they’re interested in. For example, by barely passing AP English Language and Composition, an engineering student may avoid ever having to study English again, and as such, not get a well-rounded college education. While this type of specialization has become the norm in an increasingly STEM-focused education system, the original Harvard report from 1945 that spurred the education reforms that led to AP warned against it, arguing that “a society controlled wholly by specialists is not a wisely ordered society.” The report claims that for a proper democratic society to function, a citizen must be able to understand the perspectives of other people and be able to think critically, both of which are weakened by the lack of a well-rounded education.
For many students, the AP program serves as a helpful way to give students a more advanced curriculum in college and, in many cases, helps them get into college in the first place. However, it has also evolved form its original form in a lot of ways. While originally intended to grant specific interested students a more rigorous in-depth education, in many cases it has shifted to be more focused on simply getting kids to pass the AP exam and get college credit, in some ways undermining its original purpose.
