24th November 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
It didn’t take long for the coalition government to be in power before the funding of extra tuition for the most needy students was scrapped. We all want to believe that this was because of the reasons given; the budget deficit and need to reduce public spending. However, a cynic might argue that the cut in tuition funding only really affected students who would not otherwise have been able to afford to pay for a private tutor themselves, and traditionally these students are from families whose votes a conservative government does not rely on.
Whatever your view, we can probably agree that we would rather money was spent on tuition, or money was saved and there was no tuition, than that money was spent and there was no tuition. A strange argument of course, but this appears to be the predicament that people in the US are currently faced with.
At Blue Tutors our biggest problem is finding enough students who want a tutor, and are prepared to commit to a certain number of lessons each year. Every tuition agency in the UK will say the same thing (if they’re honest), and this is why so many agencies now ask for registration fees, or for a significant number of lesson fees up front. So, you can imagine how tuition agencies in America must have felt when the No Child Left Behind scheme was introduced.
No Child Left Behind is a programme where any tuition agency can apply for government funding, and their students pay absolutely nothing. Before students had to decide whether the benefit of lessons outweighed the cost of the tuition fees, and suddenly there was no cost. Brilliant!
The sad truth is that tuition agencies didn’t accept this godsend, realise that it removed a huge barrier to their success, and happily worked to do the best that they could. Instead they looked for a way to benefit even more by submitting fraudulent lesson records. The con is that the tuition agencies offer students a cursory gift, such as a laptop, if the student will sign off $1,400 worth of lessons. Obviously the student loses out; they’re entitled to the lessons, but receive a laptop worth a fraction of the value of the lessons.
Working with a tuition agency one quickly realises that there is often an ethical decision to be made. We’re presented with choices where we can choose between increased profit or what is right for the tutor or student. We try to always make the latter choice, and have hopefully built a company where we only profit when we make the choice which is right for tutor or student. What’s incredibly sad is that so many people involved in the same industry don’t make the same choices, it’s almost as if tutoring attracts more reproachable people than most other sectors, which really shouldn’t be the case.