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[alsorun]

My daughter is in high school and she did a makeup SAT test. She failed many math problems. My wife called around about SAT tutoring. One charges 100$/hour and the other 75$/hour. So I decided to try tutoring her myself. I did not take SAT in high school as I did not go to college in U.S.. But I found these SAT are all baby math problems. I had no problem help my daughter get every problem right and we in fact spent good time together working on these problems.

I did a little math. I can earn 3*75*5*4.25=$4781 a month, working just three hours/day, which seems better than many adjuct positions are paying. Any comment on this?

[verysneaky]

I tutor (I'm a grad student). At one point I was also been the director of a private tutoring service, so I know the industry pretty well. It's pretty good money, yes. You have to consider, however, that for each hour you're tutoring, you may spend an hour or two on prep, parent communication, billing, etc., as well as marketing your own services. Also consider that someone charging $75-100 an hour is quite established. It's easy to say, "Well, I could do as good a job," and as a teacher you probably could, but you haven't built the referrals and references necessary to charge that rate sustainably. Once you've been doing it a while, most of your marketing is through word of mouth, and your prep is all done, then the $75-100 an hour is almost your real rate. But it takes quite a while to get there.

I would also say that, if you want to get into standardized test prep, you should look at the GMAT (business school) and the LSAT (law school) exams, both of which tend to pay more.

Feel free to PM me.

[verysneaky]

I guess the last thing I'd say is that good math tutors are much easier to find than good verbal tutors, but your success as a professional depends on being able to teach both. In your case, much depends on the Critical Reading section. See if you can ace, and teach, that section.

[musclememory]

The other thing to know is that the big SAT prep companies focus heavily on test-taking skills, and not just on math review (for example).  There is a lot of talk, designed to be (and that often is) useful for low- to middle-range students.  It's much easier for an average 15 year-old to learn the test writers' patterns on, say, analogies, than to learn 1000 words, of which 60 might show up on the exam.  Similarly, if you're lousy with keeping track of variables, the trick of just plugging in a low number for X and running the equation as arithmetic instead of algebra ends up being very useful.

Yes, there is money to be made in this, but realize that just because something is obvious to you (and easily explainable to your likely pretty smart daughter) doesn't mean your way is the way for everyone to do it.

[msparticularity]

There was at least one article in the NYTimes fairly recently on the difficulties of getting tutoring jobs in the current downturn. Apparently, this is one of the first kinds of jobs to get hit when times get tough. A lot of excellent and established people who have made good livings for years doing tutoring are now only able to get work intermittently. I just tried a quick search and couldn't fine the piece--does anyone else know what I'm remembering?

[alsorun]

But the two people we called insisted on their 100$/hour and 75$/hour rates. Could not they come down a little if the demand is not there for them? The 100$ rate is what really pissed me off.

Also note, I based on 3 hours/day in my previous salary calculation because I understood that one does not get 8 hours for this kind of job.

There was at least one article in the NYTimes fairly recently on the difficulties of getting tutoring jobs in the current downturn. Apparently, this is one of the first kinds of jobs to get hit when times get tough. A lot of excellent and established people who have made good livings for years doing tutoring are now only able to get work intermittently. I just tried a quick search and couldn't fine the piece--does anyone else know what I'm remembering?

[inthelab]

But the two people we called insisted on their 100$/hour and 75$/hour rates. Could not they come down a little if the demand is not there for them? The 100$ rate is what really pissed me off.

Did you haggle negotiate for a lower rate?

[alsorun]

Absolutely. But they did not budge.

But the two people we called insisted on their 100$/hour and 75$/hour rates. Could not they come down a little if the demand is not there for them? The 100$ rate is what really pissed me off.

Did you haggle negotiate for a lower rate?

[inthelab]

Absolutely. But they did not budge.

But the two people we called insisted on their 100$/hour and 75$/hour rates. Could not they come down a little if the demand is not there for them? The 100$ rate is what really pissed me off.

Did you haggle negotiate for a lower rate?

Who knows, maybe they have enough business and there is a niche for you to do math tutoring of all types.

[msparticularity]

But the two people we called insisted on their 100$/hour and 75$/hour rates. Could not they come down a little if the demand is not there for them? The 100$ rate is what really pissed me off.

Also note, I based on 3 hours/day in my previous salary calculation because I understood that one does not get 8 hours for this kind of job.

Yes, but when you remember that you're talking, basically, about an after school job, 3 hours a day, 5 days a week is pretty much full-time. Tutoring pretty much takes place between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. or so.

And what has happened, I think, is the drop in demand has driven some people out and cut many peoples' hours way back. Thus, they are NOT reducing their prices.

[msparticularity]

And, incidentally, I'm not trying to discourage you from picking up some tutoring and seeing how that goes. It well might build into something that would be a good sideline for you. I am telling you that I think it's insane to begin by imagining that you can charge as much as the experienced people and work pretty much full-time to begin with, especially given current economic conditions.

[sciencephd]

One of the problems with jobs where anyone can set up shop and the entry bar (initial cost) is low, is that the market tends to get flooded with weak service providers, and it becomes difficult to seperate the good from the not so good.  Usually this depresses prices, but apparantly not so in your market.

[tolerantly]

Keep in mind that this kind of "teaching" may piss you off so much that you decide it's not worth it.  It isn't teaching. It's test prep. That means training kids to game the test -- spot patterns in the foils, learn about types of questions and how they're usually designed, etc. -- rather than seeing that they understand whatever they're ostensibly being tested on.  The point is to make the very ordinary look better than they are.  Most of the kids and parents you'll deal with will not be interested in the kids' actually learning the math.  They just want better scores.

[alsorun]

I posted this topic more as an idea for others than myself.