In 1997, Kaplan continued to expand its mission of helping individuals achieve their educational and career goals. Revenues climbed to $117 million in 1997. The company showed significant growth in its test preparation and admissions businesses while broadening its product offerings in the areas of after-school learning programs, educational services for schools and universities, career services, and publishing. Test Preparation and Admissions. Kaplan's test preparation profits remained strong, and revenues climbed 15 percent for the year. Revenue was up in every region of the country, in every major city, and in virtually every course. Students continued to respond to Kaplan's focus on product quality and teaching excellence. Despite declines in the number of test-takers for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), Kaplan's business for both tests kept growing. In courses where the number of test-takers was flat or up, revenues surged. Revenues in courses for the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) and United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) were up nearly 35 percent, while English-language programs were up 27 percent. Kaplan's pre-college business was solid, with a particularly strong showing in private tutoring, which grew 60 percent. Kaplan continued to capitalize on the migration of standardized tests to computer. The Computer Adaptive Test (CAT) creates a greater need for preparation, and Kaplan has already begun to dominate the market. Kaplan installed computers for student use in every center in North America, providing a key benefit that its competitors do not offer. In addition, Kaplan expanded its array of CAT courses and products. Publishing. Kaplan's publishing venture with Simon & Schuster's Consumer Group produced 69 book titles in 1997, up from 23 in 1996. The venture sold more than half a million units, with gross sales exceeding $5 million. Kaplan's admissions and test preparation titles were extremely popular, and a number of new titles helped to leverage Kaplan's brand into new areas such as basic skills development and career guidance. Kaplan's software had its most successful year ever, recapturing the number-one position with 45 percent market share in 1997. In addition, Kaplan formed an alliance with Davidson & Associates, Inc., to jointly develop, market, and distribute educational software. Kaplan continued to provide information and services to students through its award-winning Web site, www.kaplan.com, which received more than eight million hits per month, and its electronic newsletters, which reached nearly 200,000 subscribers daily. Kaplan and Newsweek again published How to Get Into College, which received the 1997 Benjamin Fine Award for Outstanding Education Reporting, and added How to Get Into Graduate School. Score! Educational Centers. Score, Kaplan's after-school tutoring and enrichment subsidiary, grew from 18 centers to 37 in 1997. Company revenues and enrollments doubled. Same-center revenues increased by more than 25 percent. Score students showed significant academic gains, as the average child progressed more than six grade-equivalent months with 20 hours of math and reading instruction. Score's success relies largely on its ability to attract top talent, and last year it received nearly 7,000 applications for 150 positions. At a number of prestigious universities, such as Stanford, Northwestern, and the University of Pennsylvania, over 5 percent of the 1997-98 graduating classes applied to Score. Favorable demographics and increasing demand for after-school educational opportunities bode well for Score's future growth. The company plans to add 35 new centers in 1998. Kaplan Learning Services. This division, which markets Kaplan services to schools, universities, and businesses, piloted three in-school Score centers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, laying the groundwork for additional contracts in 1998. Kaplan reached agreements with Chattanooga State Technical Community College and Greenville Technical College to help incoming students pass college placement tests, improve academic performance, and boost their chances of graduating. In addition, Kaplan invested in Academic Systems, a leading provider of networked-based multimedia curricula for higher education. Career Services. In December, Kaplan acquired The Lendman Group, which produces high-tech job fairs and sales and marketing job fairs in North America, Europe, and online. Kaplan's Career Services division, which includes Crimson & Brown Associates, the nation's leading diversity recruiting and publishing company, became the largest provider of career fairs in North America. Kaplan plans additional acquisitions in this field in 1998. Digital Ink Co. Digital Ink continues to define the company's voice in electronic journalism. In 1997 its focus was washingtonpost.com and making it the indispensable first source of news, information, and commerce for the Internet audience focused on Washington. Signs indicate that the site is well on its way to achieving that goal. In 1998 the subsidiary also is taking responsibility for Newsweek's new-media activities and plans to aggressively grow its online presence. According to research conducted by Media Metrix, washingtonpost.com has the highest in-market penetration among newspaper Web sites in the top-ten designated market areas (DMAs) in the country. It is consistently ranked as one of the top five news sites on the World Wide Web. Since the beginning of 1997, washingtonpost.com's page views have more than doubled to 30 million a month. Several significant new services debuted on washingtonpost.com in 1997. As a result of an agreement to license tools and technology from CitySearch, a provider of community-based online information services, washingtonpost.com launched Style Live, Community Resources, and the washingtonpost.com Yellow Pages. The three sections together form a comprehensive guide to greater Washington, tapping a common library of searchable listings about civic and business groups in Washington and its surrounding counties. Readers quickly recognized the value of these new services, as did advertisers. Hundreds of local businesses signed on as advertisers, purchasing Web sites to enhance their basic Yellow Pages listings. More than 80 percent of those businesses had never advertised with The Post before. At the close of 1997, Digital Ink was at the forefront of developments in the online classifieds area. This resulted from The Washington Post Company's partnership with The Times Mirror Company and Tribune Company to create Classified Ventures. This operation provides solutions using Internet technologies that help newspapers expand their position as the nation's leading suppliers of classified advertising and related content. Already, national sites have been announced in key classified categories, including autos (www.cars.com) and apartments (www.apartments.com), with more announcements planned for 1998. LEGI-SLATE, along with its subsidiary, State Capital Strategies, continues to be the premier online information service covering federal and state legislation and regulation for business, government, law firms, trade associations, educational institutions, and other major organizations. In August a new president, Christopher Schroeder, was appointed. He had been treasurer and director of corporate strategy for The Washington Post Company. Under his leadership, LEGI-SLATE introduced an ambitious plan to combine its unique data gathering, news and analysis, and customer service into proactive industry and customer-specific solutions to critical legislative and regulatory information needs. The launch of new e-mail alert products and issue-specific analyses has already attracted new customer interest. |
By Rochelle Rothstein, M.D.
Though not the most conventional career path for an M.D., my eight years at Kaplan have afforded me an amazing array of opportunities for professional growth and develop- ment. I was hired to market Kaplan's advanced medical products and am now vice president of health sciences, a department that comprises all of our medical, dental, nursing, and allied health programs. The distance between these steps on the proverbial corporate ladder represents more than just changes in title--it symbolizes my personal and professional journey from medical resident to corporate executive. In some ways, my own professional evolution has paralleled Kaplan's metamorphosis from a mom & pop-style test-prep company to a leader in educational and career services. When I joined Kaplan, the marketing department had three people, there was no communications department, no technology department (what did we do without e-mail?), and the company was as rooted in test preparation as I was grounded in premedical and medical studies. As I traded my stethoscope for a laptop and learned a whole new lexicon of acronyms, I witnessed the company grow and branch out in new directions, acquiring new businesses, providing new products and services, becoming an oft-quoted voice on national educational issues, and growing our core test-prep business. The latter goal was achieved in part by focusing on how technology could help us manage our student database and provide computer-based customized products. And while Kaplan's technological revolution began in earnest several years ago, the recent advent of computer-based test delivery changed the pace from evolutionary to revolutionary. With the aid of technology, the Kaplan-customer relationship took on more parallels to a doctor-patient relationship. Like the best doctors, we treat every student-customer as a unique individual. We now use increasingly sophisticated diagnostic measurement tools to assess baseline test readiness (our equivalent to "health"), and we base our educational prescription on each individual's needs. Each prescription includes a healthy diet of the Kaplan equivalent of the four major food groups: high-quality review materials, classroom-based instruction with an expert, practice questions with comprehensive, test-savvy explanations, and simulated test experiences. As the company continued to move forward at warp speed, our technological advances introduced new challenges and dialectics such as paper versus computer-based content, center- versus Web-based distribution. But for me, the most personally compelling dynamic has been the age-old tension between academia and for-profit education. The relationship between Kaplan and academia has been a delicate and ever-evolving one. When I first came to Kaplan, it felt as though there were an iron curtain separating us and the medical schools. Academics had a preconceived notion about test prep; they thought it was somehow anti-intellectual and subversive. They maybe even felt threatened by the notion that students were seeking supplementary help (and paying for it). When I went to academic medical conferences, I had to conceal my name tag in order to talk to deans or the testmakers (strategic accessorizing helped). It took years of traveling to medical schools and talking to faculty about who we are and what we do to establish our credibility and gain their trust. Now, I have several deans and dozens of medical school professors and clinicians on the faculty of our medical division. I've even had the opportunity to hire some of my favorite professors from my years at UC San Diego Medical School (I live in fear that they'll decide to quiz me). I've had one medical school ask for advice on how to integrate its curriculum across organ systems (like our program), and another school asked to review our books to make sure its faculty was covering the most frequently tested material. In 1998 we will launch a major new program in full partnership with a prestigious medical school. This academic side of my job is incredibly rewarding and allows me to continue to pursue my medical interests. I write questions for our courses, edit our review books, audition the faculty lecturers, and periodically give lectures myself. I have the career in medical education I always wanted. I also have a career in business that I never anticipated. I manage a staff of M.D.s, Ph.D.s, scientists, and business people; write brochure copy; give marketing lectures around the country, and have responsibility for a multimillion dollar P & L (profit and loss)--a key acronym I've picked up over the years. I've learned that the liberating aspect of working in the for-profit sector is that we don't have to follow any of the time-honored rules or contend with the departmental bureaucracy that can slow progress in education. We just need to make sure that we satisfy our students. By listening to the students--and treating them as customers--we have been able to create innovative products that reflect the fact that style matters and need not compromise substance. In the Health Sciences division at Kaplan, product is created by a team of faculty (assuring accuracy), students (assuring accessibility), and designers (assuring marketability). Our goal is to be the educational equivalent of the Luden's cough drop: something that contains therapeutic medicine, but tastes good too. And the pressure of market dynamics ensures that we achieve this balance. If we fail at being substantive, program efficacy will suffer and bad word of mouth will metastasize; if the packaging isn't compelling, students may well choose a competitor. So far, this strategy has served us well. The Health Sciences division of Kaplan has enjoyed substantial growth over the past several years. This year alone, our medical licensing programs achieved over 30 percent revenue growth and our MCAT program revenue continues to grow in an era of declining test-takers. But don't take my word for it. Ask your doctor; chances are he or she took Kaplan. |
By Retha Hill
Being an online journalist is not always fun. The "gee whiz" factor of the Web wears off after about six months, usually the first time fickle Internet technology fails you at a crucial moment. Such as during election night '96 when a surge in demand coupled with technical problems on a major nationwide data line brought many Web sites' updating efforts to their knees. (The Post's Web site's reporting remained operable because we used an old-fashioned relay system of interns stationed in the newsroom who telephoned in voting updates to washingtonpost.com.) Or when the only way to get the full text of a D.C. financial control board report online is to scan it in, then painstakingly check character recognition by comparing each letter of the online document with the written report. Or doing data entry of thousands of database records so residents of Prince William County will know the exact address and function of all of their major government agencies. Unexplained server outages, banal conversations in discussion groups that pass for the elusive online "community," dozens of e-mails each month about the crossword puzzle are part of my daily existence. Then along comes a major story like Clinton-Lewinsky or the death of Princess Diana or the downing of TWA Flight 800 and the Web's purpose and potential become crystal clear. It allows the traditional print media not only to compete with broadcast but do a better job than radio and television in quickly sorting out a complicated news story. But it is not enough. Three years ago, I became a cyberjournalist for two reasons. I felt it was important for minority journalists to be in on the ground floor of a burgeoning new medium. As the president of the Washington Association of Black Journalists in 1992 and 1993, I often warned my colleagues in the Washington market about being left behind during this shift in resources toward an online delivery of news. I had no idea what career opportunities would be available at America Online, Prodigy, CompuServe, or the new Digital Ink, but I knew that African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans needed to be there at the beginning to shape how this medium would cover the news, create community, and play to a variety of niche audiences. The second reason I left a fairly comfortable reporting job in The Post newsroom is because I truly believed that an online product could come closer to carrying out our community journalism mandate in a sophisticated way, that an online product could close the gap between big city newspapers and the city and suburban audiences we are supposed to cover. We have had victories and failures. When there is a breaking story, especially ones that center on Washington--such as the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal or the 1997 Inauguration--our Web coverage has shone brightly. The newsroom has stepped up to allow Post stories to be posted early, to allow Post reporters and editors to engage in discussion with a news-hungry audience. The other victories have been less high profile. For example, the medium of the Web has made available information that would not otherwise be immediately available, such as reports from the proceedings of the D.C. school system's emergency board of trustees at a time when parents, students, and teachers had no idea what was going on in those closed-door meetings. Although it was time consuming to scan in those documents, it helped establish the Web site as the place to go for material not available through other sources. A calculator built by my staff when I was online Metro editor is another case in point. The calculator allowed city and suburban residents to compute, using their particular family income and data, what their savings would be under the flat-tax proposal being pushed by Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton. Norton found the calculator so useful she simply referred members of Congress and constituents to it to get a full explanation of the flat tax's potential impact. The Metro graphics staff was helpful in helping us create interactive maps to show area residents the projected patterns of growth--and the impact of development on green space, school crowding, and traffic patterns--in the metropolitan region. Further, we need to fully use the technology of the Web to tell the story. It's not just about being an unlimited news hole, a repository for documents or background articles on a particular subject, although that is important. Web technology includes animation, sound, and video, polling software and moderated discussion software. The Web component should be a part of the initial discussions about the reporting and presentation of a story, especially stories that contain a lot of data (campaign contributions, health statistics, population or development figures) that could be fed into a searchable database made available to the public via the Web. This is not bells-and-whistles stuff for the sake of being cool; such interactive content actually helps to bring the story home to people who might otherwise have trouble understanding a complicated story. Online editors and producers and the newspaper's reporting staff should work together whenever possible--for example, to animate informational graphics such as the downing of an airplane or the bombing of a building. Another news operation has a service that provides animated graphics to Web sites; however, the graphics leave much to be desired. (For example, it was hardly worth the download time to see a spinning molecule that was supposed to explain the common cold.) washingtonpost.com will only improve if we more fully use the reporting, editorial, and technological resources of The Post newsroom and Web site. We need to quickly develop community publishing software that will allow community groups, high school newspapers, religious institutions, and schools to become a part of washingtonpost.com's community pages. washingtonpost.com has only just begun to tap the enormous resources of The Washington Post and the rest of The Washington Post Company to create a Web site without equal. |
Serendipity brought me to Kaplan; opportunity has kept me here.
The scandal surrounding President Clinton and intern Monica Lewinsky aptly shows the Web at its best (updated, in-depth reporting) and its worst (unsubstantiated rumors posted as fact). But, for me, it was the best reminder of why I am an online journalist. We are breaking new ground and learning with each major news story how to better use the power of the Net. Nowadays, the Web is ground zero for any evolving, consuming news story.