Passing review on higher education

Yet his career is built upon a paradox. Despite his great success at The Princeton Review, Katzman himself has long been an outspoken critic of standardized testing — specifically the SAT.

“What’s it measuring? Not intelligence, not aptitude,” he said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian, adding that the SAT is a poor tool for evaluating college applicants. He rejects the need for a “common yardstick” for measuring intelligence, he added, saying, “I think it’s a stupid idea. It assumes that we all want the same thing.”

But Katzman is a man who can see an opportunity, and he has devoted most of his professional life to preparing students for these very same tests he dismisses as worthless.

Katzman explained that his tutoring experiences in college led him to envision a future career in test prep, which was a far less developed industry in the ’80s than it is now. While preparing students for the SAT, he came to view the testing material as “coachable,” and said he found that test prep created an ideal teaching environment.

“When you’re getting kids ready for a high-stakes test, you have their attention,” he said in a 2007 interview with The New York Times.

In founding The Princeton Review, Katzman said, his goals were two-fold. He wanted his company to serve as the “organizing principle for university admissions” and centralize test prep and college applications. His second goal — which did not develop until later – was to increase accountability in K-12 education, he said. It was this latter goal that primarily occupied Katzman during his last years at the company, as he worked with schools to help them boost their scores on statewide, standardized assessments.

Since leaving The Princeton Review in 2007, Katzman has shifted focus, founding the company 2tor, which designs on-line degree programs for top-tier universities. The current offerings for online education are “mediocre at best,” he said, explaining that the field is “dominated by for-profits that are not selective” and presents an opportunity for start-up companies such as 2tor to make a strong impact.

“Where are the really good colleges?” he asks. “They’re not playing. And that’s a real problem.”

2tor Chief Technology Officer Jeremy Johnson ’07 explained that 2tor’s mission is to help universities understand the importance of the revolution in technology and to provide them with the necessary tools to take advantage of it.

The absence of top-tier universities from the field of on-line higher education not only weakens the quality of instruction offered on the web, Katzman said, but also poses a serious problem for the universities themselves. Increased use of the Internet is a necessary step in the evolution of higher education, he added.

“We need to embrace the net,” Katzman said. “This is the moment … Schools not at the front of this wave have much more at risk than they think they do.”

Princeton has been reluctant to embrace this kind of online education, Johnson said. Meanwhile, 2tor launched its first partnership with a major university in April, developing a $15 million online teacher education program at USC.

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“Princeton doesn’t feel the heat,” Johnson explained, adding that the University is ignoring the recent growth in online education endeavors “at the cost of its relevance.”