Word: kaplan
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...like the head of a multi-million dollar operation. He is surrounded by a small coterie of staff assistants businly vying for his attention; we expect one of them to kiss his ring at any moment. A lady emerges to announce--with great pleasure and relish--that Mr. Stanley Kaplan is here in the flesh to welcome us personally...
...Yeah, right, and I'm Santa Claus," one of the students mumbles, knowing full well that there are 80 Kaplan centers in the United States and abroad. But this is the real McCoy (oops, Kaplan), and we later learn that Kaplan refuses to franchise his operation, continually flying across the country from center-to-center with the incessant drive and ambition that has made him the nation's test-prep messiah...
...Kaplan success story is a combination of Horatio Alger hype and pure chutzpah. He grew up in Brooklyn, son of a plumbing contractor and a housewife. At James Madison High School, he became enamored to teaching, and recalls now that he used to bribe his stickball buddies to listen to him practice teaching. But while he was enrolled at City College of New York, the tables began to turn...
People started paying the junior Phi Beta Kappa key-winner to tutor their children. "It was pretty primitive compared to what I'm doing now," Kaplan said recently during an interview. "Forty years ago there were no standardized tests. The big thing was grade-point average, so I tutored in the three R's." Kaplan's engaging whiz-kid personality rubbed off on his clients--his reputation grew to the point where he was tutoring 200 students on a one-to-one basis...
Meanwhile, Kaplan was graduating magna cum laude from CCNY in 1939 before earning his master's in education the following year. Before long, his high school tutees had become college students worried about a new test--the LSAT's--and Kaplan began tutoring privately for that test...