23rd February 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
There is a peculiar anomaly in our attraction to goods and services which at first seems irrational. Generally, the lower the price of something, the more of it is demanded, but this isn’t always the case. For example, there is evidence to show that people are more attracted to hairdressers with higher prices, because people assume a better quality service, based on nothing more than the price. Tuition can be a little like this.
When some parents speak to us about tuition fees, it’s obvious that they want the best deal they can get; they’re not looking for a ‘cheap’ tutor, but at the same time, they don’t want to pay significantly more for someone who won’t give the same value for money as a tutor charging less. However, not all parents think in this way, and if private tuition won’t make a significant dent in a family’s finances, then often parents don’t mind what a tutor’s fee is.
It is the affluent parents who are concerned only with the quality of their tutor, and nothing else. Unfortunately, sometimes the only factor considered by these parents are the tutor’s fee; high equals good tutor, and low equals bad tutor.
Obviously at Blue Tutors we try to ensure that our tutors are priced fairly, according to the genuine value that they offer. Sometimes we have relatively inexperienced tutors who are fantastic and charge a low fee, but these tutors will generally move up a tier, and thus increase their lesson fees very quickly (and of course, experience is something which people are prepared to pay more for).
A concern at the moment is the increasing popularity of what are being termed ‘super tutors’. Whether working independently, or through an agency, some of these tutors are charging hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pounds an hour, and students are happily paying for it. It’s true that many of these families are very wealthy, and the cost of tuition has no effect on them. However, there are families in the UK who, for fear of their children not succeeding, and because they want the very best tutor, are stretching their budget to the limit to pay for what they think is the best quality of tuition that money can buy.
The reader may be reading this and thinking ‘oh, but what if these tutors are genuinely worth what they charge?’ There are two arguments against that: the first is that if that were the case, then charging £70-80 an hour would seem reasonable, but the difference in quality simply isn’t worth multiplying a fee by ten. The more compelling argument is that many of these tutors were recent Blue Tutors, and often their tutoring ability was assessed to be average (which is good among our tutors), so the only difference between a ‘super tutor’ and another tutor charging the going rate often appears to be having the arrogance to request an extortionate fee.