If you’re a high school student with future plans that include a college education, the odds are good that you or your parents will, at some point, write a check to an organization called the College Board.

Maybe you’re taking the SAT or an SAT-II Subject Test. Maybe you’re taking an AP test—a test that you may or may not get college credit for, regardless of what score you receive. Maybe you’re paying for College Board brand prep materials—yes, the College Board offers preparatory courses, for a fee, for its own tests. Think paying your math teacher to tutor you for the upcoming final exam that he wrote. Of course, the difference is that few, if any, teachers will do this for obvious ethical reasons. The College Board, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with charging $69.95 for “The Official SAT Online Course.”

But wait, maybe you’re taking the ACT, your colleges don’t require Subject Tests, and AP classes aren’t your thing. Perhaps you’ve successfully avoided contributing to the not-for-profit College Board’s revenues, on which they pay no corporate taxes. Likely, though, you haven’t. If you happen to be a student who plans on applying for financial aid information, you’ll probably have to send in a CSS/Financial Aid Profile to your schools of choice—another $9 plus $16 per school you want to apply to.

The stated mission of the College Board, according to its website, is “to ensure that every student has the opportunity to prepare for, enroll in and graduate from college.” Sounds admirable enough. In reality, though, its policies are not reflective of the sort of egalitarian educational idea that supposedly guides them. The baseline prices alone for the SAT and SAT-II Subject Tests might make them too pricey for some students, but then add to that equation the numerous ways you can end up spending extra for your testing—rush delivery of scores, late registration, etc.—all of which can add up to make one’s testing experience an expensive endeavor.

The cost of preparation adds further burden to students who can pay and a clear disadvantage to those who can’t. Plus, another question: what do most GBN students do when they take a standardized test and are unsatisfied with their score? They take it again. But a lower income student isn’t likely to keep taking test after test in order to get the score she or he wants.

The AP program is a slightly different story, but it is one that casts the College Board in a less than favorable light. In theory, the $89 exams seem a wonderful alternative to pricey college courses. But, if you’re not going to get credit for them, they become merely a way to make your class schedule look a little more impressive—a benefit that requires you to take the test. And, again,  89 bucks for a couple of letters on your transcript doesn’t exactly scream “opportunity.” The backwards “pay us so you can maybe pay less for college” logic of the CSS Profile fees raises similar questions about the College Board’s real motives.

While it is true that many of the issues with the College Board seem to be intrinsic to the whole institution of pre-college standardized testing, the fact is that the College Board itself represents such a dominant portion of this institution that it has the means and the power to begin to change some of these realities. But it doesn’t. Instead it has spent at least $200,000 annually over the past six years (up to as much as $424,000 in one year) lobbying Congress directly and through third-party firms.

Even while the organization has taken part in charitable work in some places, and makes fee waivers available to those who meet specific requirements like living in public housing or being eligible for federal free or reduced price lunches, the fact remains that they do nothing to fix some of the most fundamental flaws in our education system—a system that has, not coincidentally, proven lucrative to the College Board and its leadership. The organization’s policies make test prep cost-prohibitive. They make taking the same test multiple times cost-prohibitive. They make applying to multiple schools cost-prohibitive. They make applying for financial aid cost-prohibitive. And they make it difficult to believe that the organization really holds the interests of “every student” before that of its executives’ paychecks.