A student named Charisma Edwards received a $40,000 scholarship check from the College Board’s BigFuture Scholarships program on April 28 in front of her family, classmates, and administrators at Loy Norrix High School in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The kind of moment that is captured on camera, shared, and discreetly added to the list of things that appear too good to be true. There was no need for an essay. GPA is not required. No score cutoff. She was holding a check that would significantly alter her college options because she had followed instructions in an app. The majority of the students in the room with her that day might not have opened BigFuture School on their own phones yet.
The College Board, the same nonprofit that administers the SAT, PSAT, and AP programs, created the free smartphone app BigFuture School. It focuses on the time after a student completes one of those tests, when the majority of the actual planning work should start but frequently doesn’t. The student’s phone launches the application. They can access their scores without a password or a printout by entering the mobile number they entered when registering for the SAT Suite exam and receiving a secure code via text. The app then links those results to scholarship databases, college profiles, career insights, and a quiz-based exploration system that presents options according to a student’s stated areas of interest. The College Board describes it as providing students with “the power to plan in the palm of their hand,” which is a corporate slogan, but it accurately sums up the problem the product is attempting to solve.
Contrary to popular belief, the practical use case is more detailed. There is a structural issue with American high school college planning: there is a significant gap between taking an assessment and using the results in a meaningful way, and this gap tends to grow along socioeconomic lines. Counselors who bridge that gap are frequently available to students in well-resourced schools. Most public high schools have high counselor-to-student ratios, so students there usually don’t. At least in part, BigFuture School is an effort to give students direct access to some of that planning capability via a device that the majority of them already own. It is reasonable to wonder if it is successful in doing so. Given that it is free and that the scholarship alone has awarded more than 30,000 students since 2019, its value is less questionable.
The most beneficial aspect of the app to closely examine is its Connections feature. Nonprofit colleges, government education agencies, and scholarship programs can see that a student with specific interests and score ranges exists when they opt in, but no personal information is disclosed until the student chooses to connect. Compared to the previous College Board model, which sold student data to colleges for recruiting purposes, this is significantly different. The College Board is likely marketing the opt-in structure as a privacy-first feature rather than hiding it in fine print because it gives the student more control.
BigFuture School begins to appear as a component of a larger strategy in light of the College Board’s more general actions over the last year or so. District C and its Teamship program, which links high school students with actual businesses to solve real problems in an organized, team-based setting, were purchased by the College Board in January 2026. Given that 28 states reported a shortage of CTE teachers to the Department of Education for the 2023–2024 school year, it announced in December 2025 a partnership with the Carnegie Foundation to expand the teacher pipeline for career-connected coursework. David Coleman, CEO of the College Board, has made it clear why all of this is important: chronic absenteeism statistics in K–12 indicate that students disengage when they are unable to make the connection between what they are learning in school and anything real. By itself, the app is not a remedy for disengagement.
However, it’s a place to start where students already spend a large portion of their day.
The number of students who download BigFuture School once to check their scores and then move on is still unknown. Schools that have access to the educator reporting portal can view usage metrics for their students, and the College Board owns the engagement data. That openness is beneficial. A clearer picture of whether students who use the app extensively are discovering options they wouldn’t have otherwise or whether the tool primarily helps students who were already carefully planning and just have one more resource at their disposal would be even more beneficial.
