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Jonathan Quilter | DISPATCH
Starting next week, Franklin County residents will be able to take the computerized GED test at Columbus State.
By
Bill Bush
Angela Surles can barely afford to buy diapers and clothes for her 1-year-old daughter.The 22-year-old single mom from the Short North quit her job at Sears to enter a six-week course to help her get her high-school equivalency certificate, with the hope of landing a higher-paying job. Her goal is to study business at Columbus State Community College, but she is surviving on food stamps and help from her family.
“With the economy right now, everybody is struggling,” Surles said.
Surles is among the roughly 25,000 people in Ohio who will take a high-school equivalency test in the next year. But the fee to take it will triple to $120 when a new computer version replaces the paper version of the General Educational Development, or GED, test. That switch will be complete by January 2014. Test takers have until mid-August to sign up to take the cheaper paper test, one advocate said.
Surles said she and others she knows can’t afford the new price.
The nonprofit American Council on Education, which owns the GED, has partnered with for-profit Pearson Vue Testing and will abandon its $40 paper test, according to the Ohio Department of Education. The state had no say in the matter.
“They’re a private corporation,” said Sharon Bowman, state GED administrator for the Department of Education. “They set the cost.”
A spokesman for the council couldn’t be reached.
The only alternative for states is to develop their own equivalency tests to get around the current monopoly, but that would take time and money.
“The issues with developing your own test is that colleges may not recognize it as a legitimate test,” Department of Education spokesman John Charlton said in an email. “Right now, the GED brand is accepted at most colleges. It would take time for colleges to accept another test option.”
On top of the price increase, the switch will mean that the number of locations licensed to administer the test in Ohio will drop from 99 to about 40 when the paper test is completely phased out in December 2013, Bowman said.
Until budget cuts in 2010, Ohio paid the entire fee for most test-takers if they could pass a practice test. So in essence, the cost has gone from zero to $120. Meanwhile, many people without high-school diplomas work at lower-paying jobs that make the higher fee a hardship.
Collectively, test-takers will pay about $2 million more annually.
“I do think the cost might prove to be a prohibitive factor for some test-takers,” said Kat Yamaguchi, assistant director of adult education for the Godman Guild Association in Columbus. That organization tutors people to take the GED test under a grant administered by the Ohio Board of Regents, and is trying to get the word out to its clients to take the paper test now — particularly if they’ve already passed at least one of the five parts.
After the paper test is replaced, those parts of it that a person had passed won’t count, Yamaguchi said. “Your test scores are basically out the window.”
The Department of Education approved the first five computer test centers in the state last month and will roll out the first Franklin County center, at Columbus State, next week, Bowman said. The goal is to have 40 sites in the state by December 2014, but several will be at prisons, she said.
Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Jim Petro is concerned the price increase could limit the number of students pursuing higher education, said Petro spokeswoman Kim Norris.
“His whole goal is helping students to complete a post-secondary education, so it concerns him,” Norris said.
Yamaguchi predicts that many Ohioans will simply not get a high-school equivalency certificate because of the price increase. Some Godman clients couldn’t even pay the $40, and one woman Yamaguchi tutored had to choose between buying her father’s medications and getting an equivalency certificate. The center takes donations to pay for the tests of clients who successfully pass the practice course, but now that money will go one-third as far.
The Godman Guild will pay for Surles — the single mom — to take her test if she successfully completes the course. Surles said she’s glad she doesn’t have to find a way to come up with $120.
“I’m already struggling,” she said.
bbush@dispatch.com
