COLLEGE BOARD - EDUCATIONAL SERVICE

A sole source award has been issued to COLLEGE ENTRANCE EXAMINATION BOARD. The subscription / service is to provide services for the United States Coast Guard Academy (USCGA) that are proprietary to The College Board. These services include College Board's Student Search Service (SSS), Interest in My Peers (IMP), Enrollment Planning Service, Segment Analysis Service (SAS), and Connections .

Connections is a tool to ensure that privacy protections for in-school standardized testing do not completely eliminate college access to these sophomore and junior high school teeters. The College Board has a monopoly on college bound student records that contain educationally relevant data useful for recruiting these individuals, qualifying them, defining markets and competitors, and assessing outcomes. The concept of monopoly pertains to geography & data.

Furthermore, College Board data also allows the government to tag high schools with modeling scores. These scores are correlated with enrollment propensity. The College Board is the only record service with academic, demographic and personal data that also provides SAT, AP, and PSAT test scores. It is the only source for leads from students who use My Big Futures (a College Board platform) to indicate interest in the USCG Academy specifically.

It is the only source for access to in-school test takers whose school districts use the PSAT to meet federal educational performance standards. The government already uses ACT/NRCCUA, the other dominant source for Lists and predictive modeling. Between the two the government is able to diversify and expand its reach marketing to students with high propensity to enroll en the USCG Academy.

Adequate information is available to understand the College Board's service; services and data are proprietary to The College Board and simply not available through any other source, primarily because the data is derived from the academic testing platforms like the PSAT and SAT, which The College Board owns and operates. The government has no leverage to influence the delivery of these higher educational services in the commercial marketplace.