AP Program · 2026 to 2027

AP Networking Is Next: What College Board Is Building After Cybersecurity, and Eight Courses That Should Follow

The third Career Kickstart course is already in pilot, and it comes with something the AP program has never issued before: an employer endorsed credential. Here is what is confirmed, what it signals, and where the catalog still has holes you could drive a truck through.

By Jeremy M. Fine · Founder, ConnectPrep · November 2026 · 9 min read

What is AP Networking, and when does it launch?

When I wrote about the two new AP courses launching this fall, the obvious follow up question was whether Career Kickstart was a two course experiment or the start of something larger. It is the latter, and the answer was sitting on AP Central the whole time.

AP Networking is a yearlong course in which students configure, secure and troubleshoot networks of increasing scale. Three domains: network design, meaning choosing endpoints, appliances, transmission media and protocols against a requirement; network configuration, meaning actually building and documenting the thing; and network security, meaning finding vulnerabilities and applying controls. It was developed against the NICE Workforce Framework with college faculty and industry partners, same as AP Cybersecurity.

The timeline is unusual and worth reading carefully, because it is staggered in a way that will confuse people:

• 2026 to 2027 is a pilot year, and it is closed. Only schools that already piloted AP Networking or AP Cybersecurity can participate, and they had to clear AP Course Audit to do it.
• The pilot exam is May 2027, digital and multiple choice only, framing students as network technicians making evidence based decisions in context.
• National launch is fall 2027, with the first full exam in May 2028.
• Pilot students do not get the credential. That arrives with the national launch in 2027 to 2028.

What is the AP Networking Credential, and why does it matter?

The course itself is not the interesting part. Plenty of high schools already teach networking through Cisco Networking Academy or a CTE pathway. What is new is what a passing student walks away with.

For sixty years an AP exam produced one thing: a score between 1 and 5 that a college might convert into credit, entirely at that college’s discretion. The AP Networking Credential is a second, parallel output. It is issued by College Board, it is described as employer endorsed, and it maps to CompTIA Network+ and the Cisco CCNA and CCST Networking certifications. A student can hand it to an admissions office or to a hiring manager, and the second one is new territory.

Sit with what that implies. The organization that built the seat time credit hour and the standardized test is now issuing a workforce credential that does not route through a college at all. Whether it holds value depends entirely on whether employers actually recognize it, and nobody knows that yet. But the direction is unmistakable, and it is the same direction New York went when it voted to end its exam graduation requirement, and the same direction Connecticut pointed when it wrote mastery based credit into statute. I wrote about that shift in more detail in the case against the assembly line school model.

What do the 42 AP courses cover, and what do they miss?

There are 42 AP courses. Five in the arts, two in English, ten in history and social sciences, six in math and computer science, seven in sciences, eight in world languages, two in the Capstone program, and now two in Career Kickstart with a third arriving.

Now put that catalog next to where the jobs are going. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the American economy will add 5.9 million jobs between 2025 and 2035, which is 3.5 percent growth, sharply down from 10.9 percent the prior decade. Of that growth, healthcare and social assistance accounts for more than 2.2 million jobs, roughly 37 percent of all net job growth in the country. Healthcare support occupations alone are projected to grow 13.3 percent.

The AP catalog contains zero courses in healthcare. College Board has said Career Kickstart will eventually reach health sciences, but it has not announced a course or a date.

Look at the fastest growing individual occupations and the pattern repeats. Nurse practitioners at 41 percent. Solar photovoltaic installers at 36.5 percent. Data scientists at 34.6 percent. Wind turbine service technicians at 29.5 percent. Two of the top five require no bachelor’s degree, and the AP program has nothing to say to a student headed toward either one.

This is not a complaint about College Board specifically. It is the same structural problem I keep running into: the catalog reflects what universities wanted in 1955, updated at the margins, while the labor market it feeds has been rebuilt twice since.

Which new AP courses should College Board build next?

These are mine, not College Board’s. Each one is scored the same way: is there a real labor market behind it, is there an existing credential it could map to, and could a typical high school actually staff it?

1. AP Health Sciences and Patient Care

The largest hole in the catalog by an enormous margin. One sector is producing 37 percent of all new American jobs and the AP program has no entry point to it. A yearlong course in anatomy and physiology, medical terminology, infection control, vital signs and patient communication would map cleanly onto CNA, EMT or phlebotomy credentialing. Staffing is the easiest of any course on this list, because every district already has a school nurse and a regional hospital that runs clinical education and wants a pipeline. If College Board builds one more AP course in the next decade, it should be this one.

2. AP Applied AI and Verification

Not a coding course. AP Computer Science Principles already exists and is not this. This is the course on how to interrogate a machine that produces fluent, confident, occasionally fabricated text: how to prompt deliberately, how to check a claim against a primary source, how to recognize what a model cannot know, and when using one is the wrong tool. Every student in the country is already using these systems daily with zero instruction. Connecticut families can read our guide to teens, AI chatbots and the new state safeguards for the guardrail side of the same problem. The academic side has no home at all.

3. AP Data Literacy

Distinct from AP Statistics, which is a theory course that loses students at hypothesis testing. This is the applied one: acquiring messy real data, cleaning it, building a model in a spreadsheet, visualizing it honestly, and reading somebody else’s chart with appropriate suspicion. Data scientists are growing 34.6 percent, but that undersells it, because the skill is now general rather than specialized. Every marketing coordinator, nurse manager and small business owner does this badly right now.

4. AP Skilled Trades and Applied Mathematics

Construction math, blueprint reading, estimating, electrical theory, and the physics of HVAC. It maps onto NCCER Core credentialing and it feeds two of the five fastest growing occupations in the country, neither of which requires a four year degree. The reason this course does not exist is not pedagogical. It is that AP has always signaled college, and the trades have been coded as the alternative to college. Career Kickstart just demolished that logic. Finish the job.

5. AP Logistics and Operations

Supply chain, inventory, routing, scheduling, and the arithmetic of throughput. It is one of the largest employers in the country and it is completely invisible to a seventeen year old, because nobody has ever put it in front of them as a field rather than a warehouse job. This is the course most likely to change what a student thinks is available to them.

6. AP Teaching and Learning Sciences

The teacher pipeline is a national problem and the profession is one of the few where high school students can meaningfully begin preparing. Educators Rising already provides a curricular model, and many states run grow your own teacher programs that would fund it tomorrow. Cognitive science of learning, instructional design, a supervised practicum in a feeder elementary school. It would also do something no other course on this list does, which is make a seventeen year old understand how their own learning works.

7. AP Local Government and Civic Practice

AP United States Government and Politics is a real course and it is almost entirely federal and abstract. Meanwhile the decisions that visibly shape a student’s life are municipal: the school budget, zoning, the police contract, the ballot language nobody can parse. This course is attending real meetings, reading real budgets, and writing real public comment. It is the cheapest course on this list to run and probably the one with the largest effect on whether a graduate ever participates in anything.

8. AP Media Production and Verification

Writing on deadline, shooting and editing video and audio, and the discipline of sourcing. It maps to Adobe Certified Professional credentials and it produces a portfolio, which is worth considerably more to both an admissions officer and an employer than a score. Journalism programs are being cut in exactly the decade when the ability to tell whether something is real became a survival skill.

Which AP courses should be merged?

Proposing new courses is easy because it costs the proposer nothing. So here is the unpopular half.

AP Macroeconomics and AP Microeconomics should be one course. They are each half a semester of content stretched across a year, many students take only one, and the split mostly serves schools that want two AP slots on a transcript rather than students who want to understand an economy.

AP Physics C should stop being two exams. Mechanics and Electricity and Magnetism as separate registrations creates a staffing and scheduling problem that small schools simply cannot solve, which is part of why only about 60 percent of American public high schools offer any physics at all, according to federal civil rights data. The split protects the students who already have the most access.

Neither will happen, and the reason is instructive. Every existing AP course has a constituency of teachers, textbook publishers and department chairs who will fight for it, and a new course has none of that until it exists. Catalogs grow and almost never prune. That is worth remembering the next time someone tells you an institution is optimizing for students.

What does AP Networking mean for your student this year?

• AP Networking is not an option for 2026 to 2027 unless your school is already in the pilot. Ask, but expect no.
• If your student is interested in IT, the sequence is now visible. AP Computer Science Principles, then AP Cybersecurity in fall 2026, then AP Networking in fall 2027. That is a three year pathway with two credentials at the end, and it did not exist eighteen months ago. Our AP and IB course map shows how it fits into a full four year schedule.
• Do not chase a credential with no track record. No employer has yet hired anyone on the strength of an AP Credential, because none has been issued. The course is worth taking if the subject is worth learning.
• Ask your department chair which APs the school dropped in the last five years and why. The answer is almost always enrollment or staffing, and it tells you more about your school’s real constraints than any course catalog will.

Frequently asked questions

When can my student take AP Networking?
Fall 2027 at the earliest for most schools, with the first full exam in May 2028. The 2026 to 2027 pilot is closed to new schools.

What is the AP Networking Credential and how is it different from an AP score?
It is a separate, employer endorsed credential issued by College Board alongside the exam score, aligned to CompTIA Network+ and Cisco CCNA and CCST Networking. It becomes available in the 2027 to 2028 school year. Pilot students in 2026 to 2027 cannot earn it.

Will colleges give credit for AP Networking?
Unknown. Colleges typically publish AP credit policies after a course launches and score distributions exist, which puts a realistic answer in late 2028. Plan as though the answer is no.

How many AP courses are there now?
42 for the 2026 to 2027 school year, including AP Business with Personal Finance and AP Cybersecurity. AP Networking will make 43 in fall 2027.

Is there an AP course for healthcare?
No. Despite healthcare and social assistance accounting for roughly 37 percent of projected American job growth through 2035, the AP catalog has no healthcare course. AP Biology is the closest, and it is not close. College Board has said health sciences is a future Career Kickstart area, but no course or timeline has been announced.

How does a school get a new AP course added?
Schools cannot propose courses. College Board develops them centrally, pilots them with selected schools, then opens them through AP Course Audit. Schools can request pilot participation when a pilot is announced, which is why watching AP Central matters more than watching press coverage.

What industry certifications does AP Networking align with?
College Board says the AP Networking Credential aligns with CompTIA Network+, Cisco CCNA and Cisco CCST Networking. The credential validates skills in designing, configuring and securing networks, and students with qualifying exam scores earn it starting in 2027 to 2028.

What are the AP Career Kickstart courses?
AP Career Kickstart is College Board’s group of career aligned AP courses that pair potential college credit with an employer endorsed credential. AP Business with Personal Finance and AP Cybersecurity launched nationally in fall 2026, and AP Networking follows in fall 2027.