Gaston Caperton, the College Board’s president, has announced that he will step down in June 2012. Since taking the helm of the influential nonprofit group, in 1999, Mr. Caperton has steered the College Board through a period of drastic expansion, more than doubling its staff and revenue.
As described in The Chronicle‘s 2006 profile of Mr. Caperton, he did much to refashion the College Board into a “service organization with a corporate ethos.”
Mr. Caperton, who twice served as governor of West Virginia, has pushed the College Board’s influence beyond higher education, deeper into secondary schools, and into other countries, especially China. Over the last decade, the number of low-income students taking Advanced Placement courses has tripled, according to the College Board.
Just as the College Board is best known for its signature product—the SAT—Mr. Caperton’s story is linked to the nation’s most infamous test. After the University of California threatened to part ways with the SAT, in 2001, Mr. Caperton concluded that the College Board would have to reinvent the exam. It did so, and quickly.
The revised SAT, which includes a 25-minute essay, made its debut in 2005. Just like the old version, the new one has proved controversial; critics have said it’s too long, too expensive, and too influential in college admissions. And in recent years, the popularity of the ACT exam has grown to rival that of the SAT, while more colleges have dropped their testing requirements.
Nonetheless, the big test is alive and well, and it’s but one part of an empire that Mr. Caperton has helped broaden. He will leave the group in a position of strength, according to the organization’s leaders.
Mr. Caperton was not available for comment on Friday. A spokesman for the College Board said the organization would soon begin the search for its next president.
Before tapping Mr. Caperton, the College Board’s leaders had chosen academics to lead the group (his predecessor was Donald M. Stewart, a former president of Spelman College). Mr. Caperton, a politician who made a fortune in the insurance industry, was cut from a different cloth than many of the organization’s members, which include admissions officers and high-school counselors. Although some of them embraced the changes Mr. Caperton made, others have worried that the 111-year-old organization had become too focused on its bottom line.
Shortly after Mr. Caperton arrived, for instance, the College Board introduced a for-profit Internet spinoff, a Web site called collegeboard.com. Although the $30-million venture ultimately flopped, some educators questioned the ethics of a nonprofit group’s peddling services related to its tests. How much profit should a nonprofit rake in?
Mr. Caperton responded to the question in a 2006 interview with The Chronicle. The College Board’s ever-broadening mission, he said, required more revenue than the organization had needed in the past. “Some people would criticize a hospital for not being free, or a university for charging tuition,” he said. “In society as it is today, to provide the services we do, we need to charge for it. And if we weren’t managed well, people wouldn’t give us money.”
