On Tutoring Companies, Part I: A Conversation with Rebecca Zook

The other day I was having a conversation with my friend and fellow tutor Rebecca Zook when the subject of big tutoring companies came up.  Both of us began our tutoring careers at large companies and left after a few years to form our own independent tutoring businesses.  Figuring I would have an appreciative audience, I started railing away at the evils of Kaplan and The Princeton Review as I often do: with a heaping helping of righteous indignation and a smidgen of self-interest.  I spoke of the fixation of those companies on profit margins, often to the detriment of students; the egregious turnover rates among their tutors; and the huge amount of overhead that is built into their breathtaking hourly rates, only a tiny fraction of which the tutors ever see.  I was just getting warmed up when Rebecca stopped me and with a puckish smile offered to play devil's advocate for the beleaguered mega-corporations.

A company such as Kaplan, she argued, offers several advantages to parents and students over independent tutors:

1. Their tremendous resources allow them to review many tests and do thorough research, the majority of which they make available to students at a reasonable cost through their published materials.
2. They provide a measure of quality control to the tutoring experience: every tutor needs to demonstrate a certain level of competence on the tests and/or in the subjects she hopes to tutor.  An independent tutor might just be some yokel with a craigslist ad.
3. They provide on-the-job training to thousands of fresh-faced college grads every year, many of whom will (like Rebecca and me) use that experience to establish themselves as independent tutors after they leave the company.

I stroked my chin thoughtfully as she made her points; but on the inside I bristled.  As soon as she was done, my populist rant resumed unabated: "Those companies may publish books on the cheap, but they do so mainly to upsell students to their expensive classes and one-on-one tutoring.  That serves to tilt the already imbalanced scales of college admissions even farther in the direction of those who can afford their services.  And they have a disturbing symbiosis with the College Board, which makes more money when people take their tests over and over again!"  Thus I carried on until we at last agreed, for the sake of amity, to talk about only pizza and pawpaws for the remainder of the evening.

Pawpaws: more delicious than tutoring!

Give Credit Where It's Due

Rebecca was right to think that I was unduly harsh on the big companies. After all, I do use some of the Princeton Review's published materials with my own students, since their manuals are usually lucid and light-hearted (and full of typos).  And I certainly would never have been an SAT tutor if Stanley Kaplan hadn't blazed the trail 70 years ago in his Brooklyn basement.  Part II of this mini-series will be an homage to Kaplan and John Katzman, founder of the Princeton Review, each of whom has a lot to teach us about standardized tests.

BUT.  I do believe that parents and students will, in most cases, benefit from choosing small, local companies or individual tutors over the big guys.  In Part III, I will make that case... and I don't plan to pull any punches. Watch out, Stanley Kaplan!  Just because the company you founded makes billions of dollars each year and is basically the only thing keeping the Washington Post profitable doesn't mean I'm scared of you.