Boom in Online Tutoring Means Another Cost for Many Students

For-profit tutoring companies are targeting students with online ads these days, and the message is tempting. Why spend so long studying, the ads say, when paid tutors or study guides can help you get better grades with less work?

At Pennsylvania State University, that marketing has grown so loud, and the commercial tutoring so popular, that the student government voted last month for a resolution calling on the university to beef up its own free tutoring options and to do a better job spreading the word about them.

Specifically, the resolution calls for “rebranding” the main tutoring center on the University Park campus, known as Penn State Learning, and spreading the word about it on social media, as well as adding more-convenient ways to use the services.

“Our biggest concern is that students are paying a lot of money” for private tutoring when they could get some free help from the university, said Emily J. McDonald, a senior who is president of the student government, in an interview. “They’re almost robbing students of money,” she added of the tutoring companies, which she said some students pay as much as $500 a semester to use. “It furthers the inequality that exists between students on a college campus.”

Tutoring college students has long been a largely low-key and low-tech affair, involving small campus centers with free services or entrepreneurial students who post signs on bulletin boards and charge small fees for help. Lately, though, helping college students do homework and prepare for tests has become big business, with for-profit online services scoring millions in investment and in-person tutoring centers near some campuses expanding because of increased demand.

It could be called the “grade-enhancement industry,” and while it’s not completely new, it seems to be heating up.

“There’s a groundswell of activity right now,” said Richard Garrett, chief research officer at Eduventures, a consulting company. The tutoring services offered by many colleges, he said, tend to be small and seem “hidden away,” so students turn to commercial services to fill the void. Meanwhile, demographic shifts among those coming to campuses mean there could be more need than ever for increasing academic-support services.

Penn State has become a hot spot for the trend, with two local tutoring companies identified by the student government as popular with students. The companies, LionTutors and PSUKnowHow, offer group tutoring sessions for popular campus courses that are essentially live-action versions of CliffsNotes for the classes. The services are designed to, as PSUKnowHow’s website explains, “prepare you for the exam questions you’ll be up against.” LionTutors’ website says it helps students save time because tutors “focus on concepts that are most likely to appear on your exam.”

Ms. McDonald said she once paid $50 for a session at one of the tutoring companies after she missed several class sessions of a course due to an injury. Though she said the tutoring helped, she now wishes she had first tried the free tutoring offered on the campus.

R. Neill Johnson, director of Penn State Learning, said he was taking the recommendations by the student government seriously, though he argued that the university’s version of tutoring is offered in a different spirit than some for-profit providers. “There is a fundamental difference in the whole approach,” he said. “I see one as, Do the least amount of work possible to make the highest grade. The other is, Explore, do deep processing of the material, and if you won’t remember it after the exam, it’s worthless to you. Because we aren’t trying to make money, we can take the slower approach.”

The companies, meanwhile, defend their services. “We’re not in competition with the university — we see ourselves as a supplemental type of service, not a replacement,” said Jennifer Cummings, a manager for PSUKnowHow. And despite the marketing, “we’re not big on, Let’s teach all the tricks so you can get through this class by the seat of your pants,” she argued. “We’re big on building the foundation for people, because these are things that they’re going to use for the rest of their lives.”

In fact, the rise of the grade-enhancement industry presents a tough question for colleges, argued Mr. Garrett. Is tutoring part of a college’s core business, which will be a new cost or even something they charge extra for, for students who use it? Or is it something a college may cede to for-profit businesses? “It’s more evidence,” he added, “of commercial interests circling the academic core.”

Reinventing Tutoring

The Internet not only has brought more tutoring companies; it also has reinvented tutoring.

That’s the argument of Richard Werbe, chief executive of Studypool, one of several companies that are trying to apply the Uber model to tutoring. Anyone can apply to be a tutor on the website, and the system connects students looking for help in various subject areas with tutors who claim expertise in those subjects. Tutoring takes place via online chat rooms.

In the past, traditional tutoring sessions have involved meetings of an hour or more to review a range of concepts. Studypool and other companies, though, let students get help on a single concept or help on the answer to a single problem, in sessions that may take only a minute or two. “You can take the normal tutoring session and basically break it down to a couple of questions,” as Mr. Werbe put it.

Shannon Sun, a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles who occasionally serves as a tutor for the platform to make extra money, walked me through the process.

“When a student sends over an assignment, they’ll tell you how much they’re willing to pay for it, and you kind of bargain to see whether that price is acceptable to you or not,” she said. She has made $5 for short assignments and as much as $50 for longer ones. She insisted she doesn’t just do the homework for the students she works with, but instead guides them. The rules of the site forbid plagiarism and other forms of academic misconduct, but “it’s definitely a gray area,” she said, and she sometimes wonders whether she is losing jobs to tutors willing to break the rules.

Perhaps the biggest player in the grade-enhancement industry is Chegg, which offers a similar online tutoring service as part of its larger study-help product, Chegg Study. Chegg, which also runs a textbook-rental service, raised more than $250 million in venture investments before going public, in 2013. Its chief executive, Dan Rosensweig, is a tech-industry heavy-hitter who previously led Guitar Hero, and before that was the chief operating officer of Yahoo.

Both Chegg and Studypool have edgy marketing campaigns that make light of the balance students face between their academic and social lives. One ad for Studypool shows a split screen of two photographs. On one side, a student sits in a library, under the caption “Didn’t ask Studypool”; on the other side, two students lie on the beach in bikinis, with the caption “Asked Studypool.”

“It totally works,” said Carol Grzych, a senior majoring in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, of such marketing. “It’s Thursday night, and you have two big homeworks due Friday. Your friends are going out. You’re just like, I just want to finish this, I don’t really care how this gets done.”

Ms. Grzych added that professors and students often view homework quite differently. “The expectation by professors is that homework will be a no-brainer, and it will be an easy grade to get,” she said. “But on the students’ side, because it’s easy points to get, you need to get them, and it doesn’t really matter how you do that.”

She said she had used Chegg’s tutoring service twice when taking an online course over the summer, and her experiences were mixed. One time the tutor seemed frustrated that she didn’t understand the concept already, she said, and seemed to want to just do the work for her. The second time, though, the tutor patiently walked her through the broader concept, though it took much longer and therefore cost more. “It’s kind of the balance of how much you’re paying per hour versus how much do you want to learn,” she said.

In some cases colleges are teaming up with for-profit tutoring companies, hoping to offer the convenience of online tutoring while paying some or all of the cost for students.

Even Penn State has a pilot project with an online business, Tutor.com, which is owned by the same corporate entity that owns the dating site Match.com. So far the project involves only a few online courses offered by the university’s World Campus, but officials are considering making the service available to students in on-campus courses in the future.

“One of the best things we get from them,” said Deborah Little, associate director for academic and enrollment services at Penn State’s World Campus, “is we get an alert if a tutor feels a student is not grasping a particular concept more so than anticipated.” That lets officials send the alert to the professor or an academic adviser to intervene.

Much is said about the high cost of textbooks. But a more-pressing question will be how to deal with the rising cost of tutoring and study-help services.

Jeffrey R. Young writes about technology in education and leads the Re:Learning project. Follow him on Twitter @jryoung; check out his home page, jeffyoung.net; or try him by email at jeff.young@chronicle.com.

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