During the Kaava debacle last month, and whatever you made of the whole story, one of the secondary plot lines had to do with the high-end college-prep tutoring business, which has always been around but has apparently now expanded to the extent that anxious parents will fork over up to $30,000 to make sure that their offspring gets into that place that starts with an H, or maybe that other place that starts with a Y. If you recall, we learned that KaavyaÂ’s parents bought for her the services of a firm called IvyWise, and its founder, Katherine Cohen, was repeatedly quoted at the crest of the scandal defending her former client, and thereby, one infers, her own integrity and that of her firm.
Now, from New York magazine’s recent annual compilation of “The Influentials” – the two-hundred-odd most influential people in the city, in that magazine’s judgment, we learn thar the person considered the father of this whole hyper-prep industry is desi. Here is Arun Alagappan’s citation in the mag:
Arun Alagappan
Founder, Advantage Testing, Inc.
Like it or not, high-end, one-on-one academic tutoring is a fixture of contemporary New York, and Alagappan is the father of the business. Twenty years ago, Alagappan, a Princeton philosophy major and Harvard Law grad, left the white-shoe law firm Sullivan and Cromwell to found Advantage Testing, a boutique tutoring service for college-bound high-school kids. Today, Alagappan and 100 fellow tutors work with up to 2,000 kids each year in subjects ranging from core academics and essay writing to SAT prep. Despite law-partner rates (Alagappan charges $685 for a 50-minute hour, although staff tutors charge less), a yearÂ’s wait is not uncommon for AlagappanÂ’s services. Alagappan insists he doesnÂ’t track test scores; regardless, Advantage has inspired dozens of high-priced imitators, and, for better or worse, transformed the precollege landscape.
Alagappan has a remarkably low-key public identity: Googling produces not much more than a sampler of stories from various years in the past two decades, where the only interesting change is the rising dollar cost of an hour of his services. Advantage Testing doesnÂ’t have an active website, just a phone number. I guess they have plenty of business on the word-of-mouth circuit, and they donÂ’t really need publicity.
The other desi that New York magazine saw fit to include in its “Influentials” was labor activist Saru Jayaraman, whom Manish blogged about here a long time ago. HereÂ’s the commendation: Continue reading →
Bonny Jain, of Moline Illinois, won the 2006 National Geographic Spelling Bee. He’s twelve years old, and he’s also a spelling champ and a violin player when he’s not naming mountain ranges in Wales.
Awhile back, almost a year actually, I first 
