社区黑料

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for 社区黑料 Newsletter

When Santana Cruz graduates from high school this spring, she will have over 100 college credits and two associate degrees. A public school student in Bristol, Virginia, that sits along the Tennessee border, Cruz began accumulating college credits as a 14-year-old freshman when she took her first College-Level Examination Program or exam. The program enables students of any age to demonstrate mastery in 34 subject areas, ranging from American government to world languages. 

Launched in 1967 by the College Board, the nonprofit that also administers Advanced Placement exams, CLEP provides a highly-accessible pathway toward gaining college credits and reducing the time and cost of earning a degree. Yet, it is largely unknown to most American high school students, who are more familiar with AP exams tied to high school-based courses that can also lead to college credit. 

Cruz鈥檚 school had limited AP options, so she took CLEP exams throughout high school with the plan of transferring her college credits to a local university, East Tennessee State, and completing a bachelor鈥檚 degree quickly and at a much lower cost. Then, her plans changed. 鈥淚 found out I got into Harvard, and they gave me really amazing financial aid,鈥� said Cruz, who plans to major in human developmental and regenerative biology. 鈥淚 think having the CLEP exams on my resume showed that I had initiative.鈥�

Unlike AP exams, which are typically tied to semester- or year-long high school courses and are administered only once each year, CLEP exams aren鈥檛 connected to a specific course and can be taken any time at a local testing center or online through remote-proctoring. This flexibility was also a flaw: CLEP was an exam without a course.

鈥淭hat鈥檚 when the light went on,鈥� said New York philanthropist and private equity executive, Steve Klinsky. He founded the in 2017 to offer free, online courses connected to CLEP exam content, as well as to provide testing fee waivers to expand access. 鈥淐LEP exams have been around since the Vietnam War, but everyone had forgotten about them. We reverse-engineered to create the courses for the exams,鈥� he said, adding that it seemed like such a simple and straightforward solution to helping address the college access and affordability challenge. 鈥淚t was so obvious that I felt duty-bound to do it,鈥� he said.

Klinsky has been passionate about education since the early 1990s, when he launched an afterschool program in New York City named after his late brother. He then went on to create the first public charter school in Harlem in 1999, before starting New Mountain Capital, a private equity firm that today has $60 billion in assets under management. 

In the 2010s, Klinsky was intrigued by the rapid rise of massive open online courses or MOOCs that enabled anyone to take free courses, often taught by top professors and subject-matter experts. He appreciated the decentralization of knowledge but felt that MOOCs were missing a key element: course credit. At the same time, he saw that CLEP exams offered credit for content knowledge but without courses. Modern States was built to bridge that gap.

Over the past nine years, some 800,000 students have taken free courses through Modern States in preparation for CLEP exams, which range from 90 to 120 minutes in length. A passing score can lead to course credit at nearly 3,000 colleges and universities, from community colleges to state flagships. For Harvard-bound Cruz, Modern States was especially beneficial. She estimates that about one-third of her college credits came through CLEP.

I first heard about CLEP and Modern States two years ago when my older daughter took the Calculus CLEP exam at Bunker Hill Community College here in Boston, Massachusetts. She was a homeschooled high schooler at the time, taking dual enrollment courses through the community college. Modern States was the resource she used to review material for the CLEP exam, which enabled her to place into Calculus III and an advanced physics course. Those course credits transferred easily to the four-year university she attends, where she is now a pure math major.

Prior to Modern States there were not many options for course preparation or help in covering the $97 exam cost, plus additional testing center fees. These constraints limited the number of students who knew about the exams. Some homeschoolers and other nontraditional students took advantage of CLEP, as did U.S. military personnel who can receive exam fee waivers through the federal government. But it wasn鈥檛 a widely-known tool for acquiring course credit to save on tuition costs. 

At Bunker Hill, CLEP is touted as an opportunity to gain credit for content that students already know, with links to Modern States鈥檚 free courses and exam fee waivers featured prominently on the college鈥檚 website. Adult learners who may be returning to college or entering later in life find the exams particularly valuable, as do native French-, Spanish-, or German-speaking students, who gain credit for their language proficiency. 鈥淐ommunity colleges in general can’t wait to save their students time and money,鈥� said Danielle Tabela, Bunker Hill鈥檚 director of testing services and assessment.

Klinsky can鈥檛 wait either. He sees CLEP and free Modern States courses as a means to make college more affordable for more students 鈥淭his is a paradigm for the way to really reduce the cost of higher or vocational education,鈥� he said, explaining that he would like to see free online courses created for anything that has a credit-bearing exam as an endpoint, whether it鈥檚 for college or career.

鈥淚f Abe Lincoln was reincarnated 鈥� with no money, just brains and ambition 鈥� this is how he would get one year of college paid for, maybe two,鈥� he said. 鈥淎ll you need is access to the internet.鈥� Klinsky and his team at Modern States are eager to see this paradigm for course credit expand, including helping more high school students and their families access CLEP exams.聽

He also hopes that more organizations, employers and government agencies that care about expanding access to post-secondary education and reducing the costs of college will recognize the opportunity that Modern States has found, while exploring similar strategies beyond CLEP.聽

鈥淢y family is very proud to support this at a full level for many years, but ultimately free courses and exams is a method that could save money and help lots of people,鈥� said Klinsky.

Did you use this article in your work?

We鈥檇 love to hear how 社区黑料鈥檚 reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers.