30th August 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
In a recent article in the New York Times, the state of the private tuition industry was examined. Unlike most sectors over the last two years, tutoring appears to be immune from the recession, and has seen steady growth in the US. A spokesperson from the Education Industry Association said that spending on private tutors is currently growing at 5% per year, down from 8-10% in 2007, but still a healthy increase. The tutoring industry in the US is estimated to be worth approximately $5-7 billion per year, and Sandi Ayaz from the National Tutoring Association said that the number of their tutors had grown by 18% in each of the last five years.
The growth of the tuition industry might seem unusual in the current economic climate, but that hides changes in the way that some parents are now seeking extra help for their children. One of the ways is simply that they are ‘shopping around’ more, and demanding more for their money. For example, in Manhattan it was common for tutors to charge $250-400 an hour, but this figure has fallen sharply, and $85-150 is now more common for what would be seen as a reasonably priced tutor. For the country as a whole $45-65 an hour is seen as a value for money price. Also, parents have begun to look beyond a one-to-one home tutor, and are now considering private tuition centres, and online tutoring platforms.
An important goal of the article was to look at what benefit is gained as a result of private tuition, and whether it’s worth the amount that many people spend. The conclusion was that it’s a very difficult result to measure. Many students score better on standardised tests, but it’s argued that this is often because they are simply more familiar with those tests having run through lots of practice tests with their tutor. Many parents consider it to be a failure if their child receives a lot of tutoring, and doesn’t end up at an Ivy league university, or Oxbridge, but an undeniable result of spending time with a tutor seems to be improvements in students’ attitude and self-confidence, something which many say is far more important than a university place.