Advanced Placement
In high school, Whitney Tilson took six advanced-placement courses: calculus, biology, chemistry, physics, Spanish and English.
Now he’s managing director and co-founder of hedge-fund firm T2 Partners LLC and four years into helping inner-city high-school students take AP classes through Reach. The program offers Saturday study sessions and cash rewards for passing ($300 for a score of 3, $400 for a score of 4, and $500 for a score of 5).
“One of the reasons I helped found this program is that nobody thinks the AP test has been dumbed down,” Tilson said last night at the Harvard Club. “These tests are almost unique in their credibility.”
Tilson was on the scene to raise money for the program, along with former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and Reach board members Jacques Garibaldi, managing partner at London Park Investments LLC, and Ji-Mei Ma, managing director of Nebula Capital Management.
“A lot of programs focus on keeping kids out of trouble,” Anderson Livingston, a director in the global credit group at American Express Co. (AXP) and Reach board member, said. “This one will help kids come to the Harvard Club as alumni.”
(Amanda Gordon is a writer and photographer for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. Any opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer on this story: Amanda Gordon in New York at agordon01@bloomberg.net or on Twitter at @amandagordon.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.
