When all the Ivy League institutions went test-optional as a result of COVID, and some seemed comfortable with the idea, I thought I’d be writing a lot less about the College Board. And I was, for a while. But they keep doing stuff that doesn’t sit right with me, and I feel compelled to ask some questions.

If you’ve been around as long as I have, you can remember when there was no Department of Education; if you’ve been doing this job as long as I have, you remember when applying for financial aid was not free. There were two competing forms: The FAF of the College Board, and the FFS of ACT. Students who wanted to be considered for any type of federal, or many types of state or institutional aid, had to pay a small fee to get the form processed.

The FAFSA was revolutionary, although many of the highly rejective colleges didn’t think it had sufficient probing power, and thus would often create their own forms for students and parents to complete. In the days when students applied to two or three or four colleges, this was inconvenient, but worth it to many people as they pursued getting, and then paying for, one of the slots at those august institutions (I have started using “august” instead of “elite” because it sounds more rational and less hyped.

Anyway, one day those august, highly rejectives got together and wondered if someone couldn’t make it easier, since they were making it harder. Thus CSS Profile was born; it’s a product of The College Board, and I don’t pay much attention to it, except when I hear people say what a chore it is to complete, especially for first-gen, low-income students who generally don’t have the assets to uncover to raise the price colleges can get away with charging them (as is their right, to be clear.)

So none of this would matter much to me on any given day, except for this announcement which was rolled out late in the afternoon last Friday. If that sounds both familiar and suspicious to you, you’re not alone: Putting out news when the weekend has already started for some people is generally considered a good way to gamble, hoping something big happens in the intervening few days to distract the media from the thing you feel obliged to put out there.

Jeremy Singer of the College Board has been tapped to help The Department of Education fix the FAFSA. If Mr. Singer had quit his job at College Board to take this public-service government position, I’d probably not have thought twice about it. But people don’t just give up a $1.7M salary to suddenly help students get financial aid: He is on sort of what–loan?–to The Education Department? And the plan, at least for now, appears to have him coming back to College Board after the fix.

And god knows, the fix is necessary. It also may be true, of course, that Mr. Singer is well qualified, given his experience with technology, although The College Board tends to shoot itself in the foot–a LOT–when rolling out new technology. I’ve written about this before, and you can look it up yourself, but they also compound their problem with the Soviet-style PR machine that never admits fault and tells everyone that everything is OK.

The problem, of course, is the glaring conflict of interest here. Singer works for a company that sells a competing product (during the FAFSA debacle, many colleges used Profile by itself to make estimates of aid), and thus, a better-working FAFSA is contrary to his own financial interests. It doesn’t matter if he takes the highest of high roads: The optics are horrible, and the reality is worse. And the problem is compounded by the fact that the issues–obvious and otherwise–raised by this have not been addressed, let alone mentioned anywhere. (The IHE article reads like a press release written by College Board; it quotes two true believers from the Board, but there are no dissenting concerns expressed anywhere.)

I hope some reporters dig into this via FOIA, because there are ancillary problems, too:

• To what extent, if any, will there be firewalls between federal data and Mr. Singer? I can only imagine there will be things he could examine as a routine part of his job that would be a veritable gold mine of insight for College Board to improve their own product.
• What types of nondisclosure components are built into the agreement?
• Do people in the Education Department know about College Board’s issues with Student Data Privacy? Do they care?
• Has anyone mentioned College Board’s tendency to lie when it comes to government relations?
• Or their history of conflicts of interest and shady dealings when it comes to government service and its sales of College Board products?
• And let’s not limit our concern about connections to governments to domestic issues. Is it at all troubling how College Board appears to have been influenced by the Chinese government?
• Is there some wink, wink agreement here that this is simply the first-steps of privatizing the financial aid process? Are there any emails that hint at that?

The other option, of course, is that this is a soft landing for Singer, and a way to get out of The College Board: Go work for the government for a while as a soft landing, announce later that this is the place he wants to be, and then a year later move to a think tank or lobbying firm that wants to get its tentacles into higher education? All of that (with the exception of that last bit) would be fine with me. The convoluted slight-of-hand would be consistent with College Board duplicity and cloak-and-dagger operations, because, unfortunately, they still have not learned how to be transparent, despite the assurances of David Coleman all those years ago.

So yes, FAFSA needs fixing. So perhaps, Singer has the skills to do it. But certainly, there are a lot of questions that ED and still-Secretary Cardona should be called to answer for. And they should be called to answer sooner, rather than later.