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 Kaavya’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 year’s wait is not uncommon for Alagappan’s services. Alagappan insists he doesn’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 doesn’t have an active website, just a phone number. I guess they have plenty of business on the word-of-mouth circuit, and they don’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. Here’s the commendation:

Saru Jayaraman Executive director, Restaurant Opportunities Center—New York Up until April 2002, potato peelers, dishwashers, and other low-wage restaurant workers were among the most powerless laborers in New York. But Jayaraman’s Restaurant Opportunities Center is changing that. At age 17, the activist prodigy founded her first organization, Women and Youth Supporting Each Other; today WYSE has twelve chapters in six states. Now a Harvard-and-Yale-educated lawyer, she files lawsuits and leads protest marches against any restaurant—Brooklyn delis as well as places like Cité—that won’t give its workers a fair shake. In two years, Jayaraman’s efforts have won more than $300,000 in judgments, and though she tends to deflect praise onto those she represents, the oversize checks on her walls speak volumes.

Both lawyers, but one an activist for low-wage, immigrant workers’ rights, while the other helps rich kids get into the college of their dreams. At N=2, this is way too small a sample from which to generalize anything, not to mention the sampling bias introduced by New York magazine’s priorities. Still, it’s another indication of the all-over-the-map image that desis present to the outside world, in which we are just as likely to apply our talents to work that comforts existing hierarchies as we are to work that breaks them down.