AP courses have long been a staple of high school offerings, with courses to cover most academic subjects. This year, they have added three new courses, one of the largest expansions they’ve made in some time. Notably, all of these courses fall under a single heading: Career Kickstart. While it may be some time before these courses arrive at your school, there is already some interest in them. In this article, we’re going to explore what these courses are, and what they offer. We’ll discuss who they’re best for, and how they stack up compared to the classic AP courses. Finally, we’ll go over whether these courses are a good choice for you, and will suit your own goals. Let’s jump right in!
AP Introduces Career Kickstart Courses
AP has launched all three of these courses under the same banner, because they have a shared goal amongst them. These courses have the intent of preparing students for careers, and for career training programs. This is in direct contrast to all other AP courses to this stage, which instead purport to prepare students for college.
Note that these are intended for students interested in careers, but are also meant to help students who are planning on entering college as well. This is a new track for College Board, and they want to cast as wide a net as possible. How colleges will react to these courses remains to be seen, but we’ll give our predictions in a later section.
Now we’re going to go through each of these in sequence, to showcase what they offer, and whether they might be something you’re interested in.
AP Business With Personal Finance
This is meant to be an introductory, college level course on business and personal finance, with a focus on real-world applications and case studies. The course will specifically be project based, with a major portion of the course consisting of a project where they prepare their own entrepreneurial enterprise. While this won’t translate into an actual business, the goal is to walk students through the steps and skills that are needed in the founding of a business.
The course will imbue students with specific, business-oriented skills. Unlike many other AP courses, these are almost entirely focused with practice, rather than theory. While there is a level of conceptualization needed, this course has far less of a theoretical framework than literature or history or physics. The class does have an AP exam, which consists of 60 multiple choice questions and 4 free response questions.
AP Cybersecurity
This course is intended to train students in the field of cybersecurity, and to act as a commensurate experience to a first-year cybersecurity college course. This is a far more specialized course than the other AP computer science courses, which focus on the fundamentals of programming and computer infrastructure. It is ideal to have some knowledge of programming or computer science before taking this course, though it is not strictly required.
Unlike the other CS courses offered by AP, this is a far more practical course, with a focus on specific hard skills for students to manage and protect networks from threats. While this is introductory, it is specialized in this specific field. This course does have an exam, which asks 60 multiple choice questions, and a single free response question. Students are expected to learn network, device, and app security through this course.
AP Networking
This course of study is on computer networking, how different devices and systems are joined into a single unified network, and how to organize and manage such networks. This is an aspect of computer science, much like cybersecurity, and so having previous coding or CS experience is probably ideal (though again, not required). This class has nothing to do with in-person networking.
This course will focus on practical skills and the application of them, and the exam is structured in the same way, with students taking on the role of a network administrator, and then answering multiple choice and free response questions on that position. The course is designed to parallel a first-year college course in the same field.
How do Career Kickstart Courses Compare to Other APs?
Not all AP exams are created equal, and colleges do not weigh all of these exams or courses the same. Some are simply seen as more difficult, or as more relevant to the core topics taught and sought by colleges. AP Bio will always be preferred to AP Environmental, AP Calc will always be esteemed more than AP Stats. It is not until these courses are offered and taken that we’ll know what colleges think for certain, but we can certainly make predictions based on existing data.
The first point is that the Business course specifically is not going to appeal to most colleges. It isn’t necessarily going to be a bad course to take, but AP Calc, AP Stats, and AP CS are all going to be more valuable to a prospective business major than this course. This course is more valuable than a non-AP business course, especially for the impact on your GPA, but we don’t expect colleges to prioritize it highly.
This is because most colleges, especially top colleges, do not like to see themselves as job preparatory programs, even at those top schools which offer a business major. Beyond that, even at colleges with strong business programs, like UT Austin, you will probably be required to take introductory business courses even if you get a 5 on the AP exam.
The computer science courses have similar, though distinct issues. These are going to be less useful than either of the existing AP CS courses, as they are both far more specialized, and a general baseline knowledge of computer science will serve far better in university studies.
These courses may be helpful if you are particularly interested in studying CS, and want to cover more introductory topics. We recommend only taking these as electives, and not in place of the core CS courses, or any other core AP course. The most important AP course for students interested in computer science is and remains AP Calculus (especially Calc BC).
Should You Take AP Kickstart Courses?
This is going to depend on several factors. The first point is that these courses are not going to be widely available; as with other APs, they will be rolled out gradually, and tested while they go. It will be the choice of individual districts and high schools whether or not they want these courses to be offered, and whether they fit with a school’s mission.
Thus, for the first year or so at least, you may not have the option to take these courses. But we’ll assume you did, and then ask who these are for, and whether or not they’re actually beneficial to take.
These courses are, more than anything, an attempt by College Board to expand their market. AP Classes are designed for students who plan on attending college, and to that end they’ve covered pretty much every academic subject, and a number of non-academic ones as well. If they want to keep expanding the number of students taking these courses, then they need to find new angles, which is where these courses come in.
These are still in the same mold, but there’s a reason they’re grouped together as “Career Kickstart.” These courses are intended for students who are interested in technical education and career training, less than those who may be interested in theory and a top college. Both of these are valid paths to take, but they are different paths, with differing requirements.
There is some cynicism on the part of College Board here, a desire to extract even more money from high school students. That doesn’t make the courses themselves bad, but there is a reason they’re cordoned off from the other AP courses conceptually, more aimed towards technical education.
If you are interested in a career in one of these fields, or pursuing a more technical field of study at college, then these can be good courses to take. They won’t prepare you directly or fully to enter a career, but they can give you a taste of what these paths are like, and if they’re the kind of thing you would enjoy being part of long-term.
For students who are interested in attending an elite university, these courses aren’t bad, but nor are they particularly useful. You can take them as electives, and they may have a benefit for your GPA, depending on how your school weighs AP courses, but they won’t add anything special to your transcript. Wharton isn’t going to be any more likely to admit you because you took AP Business.
As always with high school coursework, the classes you take should be based on your interests and your long term collegiate goals. These have the potential to be good and interesting courses, but aren’t anything revolutionary, and aren’t going to be particularly helpful, or at all necessary to engage with, for the vast majority of students.
Final Thoughts
AP courses aren’t quite like college courses, but they are often more challenging than the other options at many schools, giving students a chance to stretch their intellectual muscles. Not all of these courses are created equal however, and what we can see so far suggests that these new offerings are on the low end of the scale. We will keep an eye on them once they’re rolled out however, especially as colleges decide what credits, if any, they’re equivalent to.
It’s hard to plan out your high school coursework, to know what admissions officers will think of your choices, and how best to prepare yourself for a top college. That’s where Ivy Scholars can help. Our mentors are experts on the admissions process, and at helping students plan out how to get there. If you’re looking for advice on which courses to take, or on understanding how AP courses matter, then schedule a free consultation with us today. We’re always happy to hear from you.
