John Katzman

John Katzman (born October 10, 1959) is an American EdTech pioneer. He has established a number of companies which assist students with their studies and career choices, including Princeton Review, 2U, and Noodle Partners. The last two companies are online program managers (OPMs). Katzman has also authored books on the subject.

Katzman was born in New York City in 1959, and grew up there with brother Richard, and sister, Julie. Katzman went to Birch Wathen, a small independent school, from kindergarten through high school. He attended Princeton University, where he majored in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and then switched to the school of Architecture. He started tutoring in sophomore year to pay his expenses, and continued through college. Katzman graduated from Princeton University with an A. B. in architecture in 1981 after completing a senior thesis titled "The Dead Tree Gives No Shelter."

Katzman has been involved in the founding of several other education companies, including Tutor. com, Student Advantage, and Eat New York, an early software based restaurant guide. He is an angel investor in two dozen education technology ventures, and has served on the boards or advisory boards of several others including the National Association of Independent Schools, the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, The Institute for Citizens & Scholars, Carnegie Learning, and Renaissance Learning. In 2008, Katzman and his wife pledged $1.5 million to help fund the Katzman/Ernst Chair in Educational Entrepreneurship, Technology and Innovation, an endowed chair in the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education to train and certify teachers for urban schools.

Katzman was a co recipient of a Cable Television ACE Award in 1995 for Princeton Review's Student Admissions Television, an education special about the SAT. Princeton Review's Inside the SAT software was the recipient of a 1996 software CODiE award. Katzman was a recipient of the 2018 ASU GSV Lifetime Achievement Award, which "honors individuals whose lives have had a profound impact in changing the world for good".

At Princeton Review, Katzman was one of the first cybersquatters on the Internet. In 1994, he registered Kaplan. com, and then taunted that competitor by encouraging visitors to tell their stories about the company on that page. The case went to arbitration, where he offered to sell the domain for a case of beer; Kaplan declined, and was awarded the domain, leading Katzman to state that "The folks at Kaplan have no imagination, no sense of humor and no beer."

As a founder of both 2U and its major competitor, Noodle Partners, Katzman is often mentioned in articles and discussions surrounding the Online Program Management (OPM) industry. At 2U, Katzman popularized the revenue share model in which OPMs take a percentage of a university’s tuition revenue in exchange for program management. This business model is debated among higher education constituents and policymakers but remains popular today. A 2019 article by Kevin Carey published in the Huffington Post names Katzman as the impetus for the development of the entire OPM industry and some of the issues that have since arisen, including revenue share and runaway digital marketing costs. Katzman, Carey says, is now fighting to change the tuition splitting practices that he created. In 2020, however, Noodle Partners teamed up with Strategic Education to use WorkForceEdge, a platform to connect employees with educational programs. Strategic Education is the parent company of Strayer University and Capella University.

Katzman, John. "A Civil Education Marketplace" (May 10, 2016). The State of Entrepreneurship in K–12 Education. Lutz, Andy, Katzman, John, and Olsen, Erik (March 1, 2004), "Would Shakespeare Get Into Swarthmore? ", The Atlantic.

Katzman lives in New York and is married to Alicia Ernst. They have two children, Daniel and Lyra.