Last week, I wrote about how College Board and the Highly Rejective Colleges are to blame for the concerns being expressed by many high school and independent counselors about the lack of SAT testing sites in their communities. In some discussion groups I participate in, these concerns are increasing and amplifying. And to date, College Board has done nothing about it that I can see.

Part of this, of course, is the timing of the announcements by the colleges, to take effect for the next application cycle. This caught a lot of people off guard, as you might expect, and has created a new sense of urgency among the huddling masses yearning to get into one of the “elite” institutions. And part of the problem is the College Board, which has shown time and time again that they’re really good at self-promotion and at boasting about their mission to “connect students and colleges,” but pretty crappy when it comes to things like logistics, customer service, common sense, and honesty.

The crux of the problem, as I read the complaints, is that College Board, a company with over $2B in assets, and positive bottom line financial performance of over $100M per year, is relying on the largess of schools and low-paid proctors to solve the problem created by the Highly Rejectives. In other words, “You people who claim to be in education for the good of students should shoulder this burden; don’t expect us on Vesey Street to do so. We hardly ever hear these complaints.”

So I started thinkin’ and researchin’, and here is my solution.

If College Board can’t meet market demands, and if a small subset of wealthy universities want to require a test, let’s get these two star-crossed lovers in a room and let them get down to business.

I went to GuideStar last night and downloaded the most recent federal tax returns of all the private institutions now requiring the SAT (or those about to). Because financial performance goes up and down, I averaged two years of data to get a single-year average, and came up with this.

Your eyes do not deceive you: Collectively, these institutions have–in the two most recent years available–generated a collective operating surplus of almost $20B, or about $9.9B per year. That’s not a typo: Nine billion dollars per year.

Using standard business calculations, and considering the College Board’s annual bottom line of $130,000,000, I’d guess that these institutions could purchase the financial assets and business operations of College Board for ($130,000,000 * 20) + $1,600,000,000, or about $4.2B, or roughly half of the leftover pile of cash these places generate each year. That of course, is still a lot of money, but the average contribution will go down when Princeton, Penn, Northwestern, Rice, and others follow suit shortly. And, of course, it is not a lot of money compared to the collective $183B in collective endowment assets of these fine institutions, data I also downloaded last night from IPEDS.

If these places want to require the SAT, they should pay for it, and not hoist the burden on already over-worked staff at high schools. Even if College Board paid decent proctor stipends that would convince people to give up precious weekend time, there is still considerable cost to the schools to run the program.

And just think: The universities could create a better test, free of the pressures of running a business that has to look like a not-for-profit. They could sell shares in the new venture to any college that wanted to use the rebranded SAT. And they could pay people what their time and labor are worth.

Oh, wait.

Well, I’m sure they’ll figure that out too.