On March 19, College Board announced that it would be adding two new courses to its Advanced Placement offerings for the 2026-2027 school year: AP Cyber and AP Business Principles & Personal Finance. These are the first two in an evolving roster of AP Career Kickstart classes that switch their focus from academics to vocational education. This shift reflects a growing trend in education around the county where college readiness is being de-emphasized and non-college-bound students have more educational options.
According to College Board, AP Cyber (which consists of a “Cyber: Networking” class and a “Cyber: Security” class) will be piloted at hundreds of schools nationwide, including St. Vrain’s Innovation Center. While College Board typically partners with colleges to develop the curriculum and resources for their AP classes, these classes were developed with help from IBM and CompTIA, an international provider of industrial training and certification.
AP Business Principles & Personal Finance will, according to College Board, “introduce students to the fields of entrepreneurship, marketing, finance, accounting, and management through real-world business application, case studies, and project-based learning.” This course aligns with the National Standards for Personal Financial Education and was developed with help from the US Chamber of Congress. While AP Business Principles & Personal Finance is not getting a 2025-2026 pilot, it will be available at hundreds of schools by Fall 2026.
Traditionally, an incentive for students to take AP classes has been the ability to get college credit for high scores on their AP subject test. For example, the University of Northern Colorado will exempt a student from ENG122, a freshman course required for all undergrads, if the student earns a score of 4 or 5 on the AP English Language and Composition test.
This will also be true for the new Career Kickstart courses with an additional benefit: students that receive a high score on their AP exam will get a fee waiver to take the CompTIA certification exam. CompTIA exams are usually $350 per test, so these waivers are the College Board’s way of providing the same value to non-college-bound students that college-bound students get from having a three-credit class waived.
The entire AP Career Kickstart program is indicative of how education is changing to focus more on the practical than on the academic. The AP Career Kickstart announcement followed on the heels of the introduction of HB25-1278 to the Colorado General Assembly on February 20. If passed in its current form, the bill will push schools to focus on more workplace readiness by changing how they calculate a school’s report card.
Essentially, to get a perfect score on a third of a high school’s yearly state evaluations, every unaccommodated student would have to earn college credits or an industry certification by the end of their senior year (though the bill stops short of making these required for graduation). This change would push Frederick’s administrators and counselors to make sure anyone not taking AP or CU Succeed classes was enrolled in PTECH, PTEACH, Frederick BioMed, or one of the many innovation center programs.
The shift away from a “make everyone college ready” mindset to “make everyone career ready” has been growing for the past decade but was shifted into high gear with the breakthrough of generative AI in 2023. Many pundits questioned if traditional education would even be needed in an AI-driven future, and while generative AI has turned out to be a lot more hype than substance, the need for a new education for a world of machine-think became a major educational issue. Compounded by the reality that college enrollment is dropping across the country, a shift away from primarily college-focused schooling to a balanced approach between career and college makes sense for Generation Alpha.
While AP Cyber and AP BizPrinc are the only Career Kickstart classes revealed to the public so far, College Board says it is “exploring adding additional pathways—including in health science.” AP Biomedical may be a reality in a few years.
The same could happen with other popular Career Exploration and Technical Education offerings that fall into the Big Futures Career Directory (which has been used to inspire new AP offerings in the past). AP Culinary Science. AP Robotics. AP Virtual Reality. AP Aeronautics. AP Video Arts. AP Cosmetology.
Who knows? Maybe the Lantern will be part of a future AP Journalism class.
