What Stanley Kaplan Wrought
Stanley Kaplan who died on Sunday at the age of 90 came of age during The Great Depression and sought entry to medical school at a time when minorities were subject to stringent quotas.
Although he graduated second in his class at City College in New York City and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa he felt his religion and his affiliation with a public school worked against him. He wrote, “I had a double whammy against me.” The experience made him an advocate of test preparation.
More than that, some would say the late Mr. Kaplan was a visionary and an entrepreneur. He certainly spawned a crowd of competitors, The Princeton Review and even his former opponent The College Board among them.
Still Mr. Kaplan’s lasting legacy may not be his family or his philanthropy. He may well have planted the seeds of the salvation of the newspaper industry. As Karen W. Arenson reported in The New York Times, “Today, Kaplan is a diversified education company with than a quarter-billion dollars in revenues and is the Post Company’s largest business.”
Other newspapers have followed suit. In Britain, The Daily Mail and General Trust, the tabloid conglomerate, last year brought in 18% of its revenue from its information subsidiary.In 2008 it acquired subidiaries through its Hobson’s division that are familiar to anyone who has filed a college application recently—Naviance, College Confidential and AY Recruiting, which processes the Common Application and provides recruiting services for many schools, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation among them. They have a subsidiary scouting for such opportunities.
Just as Mr. Kaplan found a niche in the lucrative world of for profit test preparation, newspapers have profited from it. And it is possible other imitators may not be far behind.
Tags: entrepreneurship, New York Times, newspapers, small business, test preparation, Washington Post
