how much do college essay tutors charge

how much do college essay tutors charge

Factors Influencing Pricing Strategies of College Essay Tutors

1. Introduction to the College Essay Tutoring Industry

The college essay tutoring industry is a competitive environment of both individuals and companies. Different brands charge significantly different prices for the same service. The process of how a company decides to price its services is dependent on multiple factors, including production costs, the structures of the competition, target clientele, the service provided, and dynamic pricing models. This paper focuses on investigating these factors further.

Fixing a word or altering syntax is the difference between receiving the coveted “Dear Applicant” or “Dear Future Freshman” letter. Under these circumstances, repetition is the key to having many students pass through the system in a short period of time. The college application process is competitive and, at times, confusing to the young adults who undergo it. Some fortunate students have tutors to guide them through essay drafts and revisions.

The “college essay” tutoring industry spans companies and individual tutors. Countless tutors are now capitalizing on a niche of the college admissions counseling industry that helps prospective college students improve their written application essays. Why the Boom? The Emergence of “Essay Edge,” a company that has been helping students put their best foot forward since 1997, was the catalyst for the college essay counseling explosion. Since then, the industry has grown to include essay “factories,” individual tutors, corporations, and non-profits.

The college application essay process should be a good fit for college counseling for three reasons. First, tutors can help students who demonstrate hard work, intelligence, and motivation but who need to polish their writing chops. Second, despite the substantive material, the work itself is fairly formulaic and easy to replicate. Third, the pay is commensurate with the time commitment. In other words, the payoff is big, making this a viable and complementary addition to other portfolio options.

2. Factors Affecting Pricing Strategies

Despite the fact that the strengths of areas such as engineering, business, or art may attract young tutors, even some young juniors, the number of young students who choose to take the SAT is significantly increasing. Because of the increase in the number of applicants, the time required for the entire SAT degree has also increased, indicating a great increase in the number of students taking the SAT. Various factors, such as experience and expertise in using the SAT, affect the number of students and the income amount for tutors. If we do not take into account the assumption of differential income, starting at $12 per hour is a reasonable amount. Time and quality of the contract may be slow to offer, but showing a level range that is both the same for starters.

There are several factors that determine not only whether or not someone decides to become a college essay tutor, but also how much different tutors should charge in order to maximize their expected utility. The prices charged by the first generation in their model correspond to the differential in profits that arise from the concession that an additional customer is willing to extend to a tutor with more expertise. The differential arises endogenously in their model from market demand and tutor-specific fixed factors. However, in the example set-up in this paper, the first generation of college essay tutors with more experience – seniors who have already been accepted to college compared to juniors who have purchased the Common Application system – do not charge a higher price and will not charge a higher income. This is indicative of chronic market oversupply.

3. Comparison of Pricing Models in the Industry

To support aspiring college students who seek advice regarding what company they should subscribe to, one insight we can add includes the pricing models available in the industry. By including this information in our text, we hope to shed light on a different aspect of the college essay tutoring industry. In this section, we present a comparison of the different pricing models used in the college essay tutoring industry. We discuss each pricing model, its indicators of use, the potential strengths and weaknesses, and conditions under which different pricing models may be optimal.

To gain a better understanding of current practices in online college admissions essay tutoring, we have interviewed and discussed perspectives related to pricing strategies with multiple college essay tutors who mentioned that they are currently operating in the “middle” or “high” tutoring sector of the college essay industry. According to the college essay tutors we have interviewed, several different pricing models are used in the college essay tutoring industry. The most popular seems to be an hourly rate, but there are also package-based pricing models, subscription-based models, performance-based pricing in fixed packages, and other pricing models. An hourly rate of $300 is charged by only one participant, and she consistently charges a flat rate of $300 per hour. This pricing model is only possible because she has enough requests to consistently maintain her rates and the number of hours she works. Correspondingly, for subscription-based pricing, there are participants who charge subscription fees for a set period of time for unlimited hours, and participants who limit the number of hours per week. A fixed subscription fee ranges from the minimum price of $300 for 1 week to the maximum price of $8000 for 4 weeks. Only one participant uses a pricing model of 8 hours per week with an unlimited number of essays that can be edited per hour. For performance-based pricing, the essay tutors feature a fixed-priced package based on the number of essays edited.

4. Value-added Services and Their Impact on Pricing

Can we determine whether value-added services increase college essay tutors’ sale prices? Should they increase college essay tutors’ sale prices? It seems likely that they would increase the sales price because these services are provided in exchange for tutor time. This makes it an effective competitive strategy. It also appears that more experienced firms would have more comprehensive services. In general, each of these services requires extra time and effort from the tutor, so the tutor is likely to pass some of the cost of this effort on to students in the form of higher prices. Further, the sale price of college essay tutoring increases with the reading time tutors expend on students’ documents. Considering that quality-oriented tutors provide tailored feedback to each student, they appear to be price-discriminating types. In situations where the tutor can determine willingness to pay, the sale price of college essay tutoring should increase with WTP. Additionally, providing tailored services makes people think that the services are better fit for their preferences, so they are more willing to pay. Thus, the sale price should fall with the number of these services offered.

Value-added services are also included in the price of college essay tutoring. Tutors frequently offer personalized feedback on students’ writing. To provide this service, tutors must read a student’s document, analyze students’ writing, offer specific feedback about writing quality, and explain which parts of the essay need improvement. Furthermore, some tutors provide students with comprehensive written comments that may include grammar and mechanics assistance. Some tutors also provide students with a document giving them suggestions on how to write their papers and/or a list of possible topics. If tutors have several years of tutoring experience, they can show students’ essays as examples for the next student.

5. Conclusion and Future Trends

The range of different pricing strategies currently being utilized in the industry provides students the benefit of choosing a tutor that works best for them, regardless of their own family or student-specific situation. There are a variety of potential future trends that might change elements of the industry and how tutors set prices. The high industry demand and relatively flexible and changeable nature of the market suggest that future planners will need to pay careful attention to these important contributors to college essay prices. As the college essay tutor industry is currently a sizeable and crucial segment of the economy, consumers ought to find this review interesting as it provides insights into prospective costs and price changes.

The ultimate pricing strategy used appears to be a hybridized, mostly individualistic determination of final price. This may or may not correspond to the potential price strategies outlined within this article; an examination of the price decision process with the tutors that use these factors is beyond the scope of this paper. Factors affecting the pricing strategies of college essay tutors has become a significant source of income for a variety of people, and an optional but extremely popular service for a specific segment of American high school students. The factors found to be significantly related to price were largely those types concerning the intrinsic value of the service or the quality of the service as perceived by both the student and tutor.

This article presents a review of the literature conducted on the factors influencing the pricing strategies of college essay tutors. The discussion covers a variety of different factors, broadly grouped together into three categories – student-specific factors, tutor-specific factors, and industry-specific factors, and delineated into twelve types. The examination of the different types of factors allows authors to determine exactly which are being modeled in various pricing strategies used by college essay tutors, as discussed in the Pricing Models section. The popularity of the utilization of different categories of factors in the papers reviewed is evidence of the importance of these factors in the setting of college essay tutor prices.