Stanley H. Kaplan

On August 23, 2009, Stanley H. Kaplan left behind a changed world.

As the founder of the nation's first test preparation company, he built a new global marketplace in standardized test preparation. He started his company from his parents' Brooklyn home in 1938, and it became a chain of more than 100 centers nationally. After selling his business to the Washington Post in 1984, the education business grew to a global giant in the paid-education market. He remained working there until 1994.

He challenged the College Board's position that tutoring won't help prepare students standardized tests. “To say you can’t improve scores is to say you can’t improve students, and I disagree with that,” he told The New York Times in 1979. He convinced the Federal Trade Commission that students could be helped through test prep, and by doing so launched a multi-billion dollar test prep industry.

Mr. Kaplan was rejected from medical school, and yet later tutored thousands of students on the MCAT. In Manhattan the Rita and Stanley H. Kaplan Cancer Center at the New York University Medical Center is a reminder of his impact of this world.

He loved his work. Kaplan spent long nights devising practice SAT questions and finding entertaining ways to teach the Pythagorean theorem.

Mr. Kaplan believed that students should have access to higher education based on their capabilities, not financial backgrounds or connections. Ironically, many students in a recent survey conducted by Logical Steps at Arizona State University found that students perceived Kaplan's courses to be very expensive, but safe. Newsweek wrote the following.

Today SAT prep courses are often viewed as a pricey tool that gives an advantage to upper-middle-class kids in the admissions arms race, but for decades Kaplan's clientele was striving ethnic New Yorkers who hoped higher scores might put them on par with WASPy prep-schoolers and Ivy League legacies. "He challenged society with the notion of meritocracy," said Andy Rosen, Kaplan's current CEO, in his eulogy.

I'm not sure if his company is continuing his belief or just cashing out, but Mr. & Mrs. Kaplan became big philanthropists, and I raise my glass to his legacy.