The College Board has decided to release two new courses for the 2026-27 school year for a host of reasons, though largely due to a reported lack of business knowledge, financial literacy and career readiness among high school students. These classes are a part of College Board’s kickstart program, which aims to give more direct preparation to high-demand careers.
The official course names are Advanced Placement Business with Personal Finance and AP Cybersecurity, and both of these courses will be offered at West High next year. The AP Business with Personal Finance course will be taught by business teacher Diane Fickel, who is excited at the prospect of teaching her first AP class.
“The curriculum will go into a much deeper dive of various things that we cover in Marketing or Intro to Business, and there’s some finance and some entrepreneurship too,” Fickel said.
The course will include mainly project-based assignments designed to prepare students for situations they might encounter in the real world. The final exam for the class will be project-based, in which students must give a presentation offering financial advice after reviewing a fictional financial profile.
Student Aydan Thomas ’27 is planning to take the new business class next year to get a more in-depth understanding of business concepts that he was not able to gain from the normal trimester classes.
“In an AP class, it’ll definitely be more rigorous and go more in depth, so I’ll definitely get more knowledge,” Thomas said.
Thomas’s leadership position on West’s Business Professionals of America club also influenced his decision to join the class. As a member of the chapter’s student executive board, he believes that taking the class is a part of being a good role model for other students.
“I think taking an AP class like AP Business sets me apart, because it shows that I’m held to a high standard,” Thomas said. “Taking a college class like this is definitely good for everyone, and I want to be that first person to take that step.”
The other course, AP Cybersecurity, will be taught by David Alexander, who currently teaches Cybersecurity One and Two. He likes cybersecurity because it’s applicable to the everyday world and it encourages general computer literacy.
“Any interaction that you have online, cybersecurity is an issue, because if you can’t be confident that your communication online is secure, then you are at risk,” Alexander said. “It’s a course that exposes you to almost everything else about computers besides coding.”
The AP Cybersecurity exam has two main sections, one of multiple choice and one of free response. Students will be presented with scenarios in which they need to use content knowledge to determine what is happening and suggest a solution in the free response section. Those with a high enough score on the AP exam will also receive an AP Cybersecurity Credential which they can use to prove their knowledge in the workforce.
Both of the fields these new AP classes prepare for are in high demand and address the growing number of jobs in their respective fields. These classes aim to give students an education more directly applicable to the workforce and prepare students for their careers.
“Cybersecurity gives you a lot of skills that are transferable…to all kinds of different fields: analytical thinking, looking for patterns, reasoning and gathering evidence from different sources,” Alexander said.
