our college essay tutors help

our college essay tutors help

The Impact of College Essay Tutors on Student Success

1. Introduction to College Essay Tutors

At the end of my junior year in high school, my classmates and I were informed that we would have a week in September of collective time from all of our classes in order to work on writing our college essays. Some of my classmates hired private “college essay tutors,” and as the week commenced, most local tutors, including ones who will come to your house in order to work with you, were mostly booked with our classmates. A handful of my classmates hired college essay tutors in different time zones in order to take advantage of time differences, and to be able to work with the tutors once the students’ school days were over. When I asked my mom if I could hire a tutor, she told me no. She committed to personally working with me in order to edit drafts of my essays. As of the conclusion of my senior year, only one of my friends chose not to hire a college essay tutor and ended up doing well in the college application process.

A year later, as an incoming senior at the University of Pennsylvania, it got me thinking as to how important was the effect of these tutors actually on our essays. After all, college admissions counselors publicly claim that they can spot essays that have been overly-edited by adults. This paper uses a dataset of all students in the N.Y.C. public school system who took the SAT to estimate the relationship between employing a tutor in the application process and student success. Data from the performance on the SAT, the scores of which are widely recognized as important for college admissions, are used to assess the varying effects of college essay tutors on the academically strong and weak students within the public school system.

2. Benefits of Working with College Essay Tutors

College essay tutors provide a wide array of benefits for students in need of essay writing advice. Writing a great essay is an important part of the college admissions process. It may be the first time in a student’s academic life that they will be telling their own story to a group of strangers. It can be a daunting task, especially for a stereotypically poor student writer. A college essay tutor can make the process more seamless and help a student create a compelling essay that will push them ahead in the admissions process. College admissions can be trickier now than ever, with acceptance rates and number of applicants rising simultaneously. Writing a compelling essay can help students stand out in these large groups of applicants. The counselor-to-student ratio is often very large in today’s high schools, so students cannot always get personal essay writing guidance while at school. College essay tutors bridge the gap between administrative guidance and writing support.

There are a number of benefits to be gained by working with college essay tutors. Working with a tutor allows a student writer to receive one-on-one focus for their essay. They can bring their tutor any essay topic and have a conversation with their tutor. Students will be able to find topics that are perfect for their purposes by doing so. Many students simply cannot think up great essay topics alone in their room. The ability to try out a few prompts or brainstorm with someone can make the writing process much easier. A tutor will encourage the student to focus on the essay, ensuring that the final product is polished and focused. College essay writers can outline and edit to their heart’s content when working with a tutor. Since the tutor is not a family member, admissions counselor, or friends, students feel unusually free to confess how much help they actually need with the essay writing process.

3. Key Strategies and Techniques Used by College Essay Tutors

Models for how college essay tutors might have had a positive effect on student success come from a variety of academic areas. While the literature about college essay tutors is quite small as compared to the literature on other predictors of post-high school success, and while few studies provide quantitative evidence of how much a college essay tutor contributes to the outcome of interest, there are a few studies reporting thoughtful, research-based practices of post-high school college essay tutors of low-income students. Tutors specifically report that their biggest added value is correcting grammar and editing the same paper with the student, and that having an extremely low student-tutor ratio of 1-1 or 1-2, as well as meeting very frequently with students, is important.

Additional techniques include encouraging senior yearbook teachers or afterschool programs to work on college essays as part of their work, and making college word processing computers available to help them. It has also been suggested that some students’ essays may replace a weak teacher recommendation with a strong one. In essence, anecdotal evidence perceives that college essay tutors partially fulfill the role of the professional guidance staff in the eyes of their former high school students. While it is as yet impossible to determine to what extent these strategies might help, possibly careful use of them might help improve at least the application purgatory aspect of the readiness problem arena. This brief highlights the impact of college essay tutors on student success.

4. Case Studies: Success Stories of Students with College Essay Tutors

In the early summer, prior to her senior year, Julia flew in from the West Coast to spend a few days working on her essays, following her junior year sessions with Edswell. Her tutor, Leyla, offers her views on that effective collaboration:

Leyla: Sometimes tutoring is more about removing the barriers to confidence than about academic skills. Julia arrived at her four-hour study sessions from the East Coast, with a tired, deflated, unconfident demeanor. Still wearing her travel clothes, she kept her head down while marking up her essays. I knew that Julia came from a prep school culture that urged each student “reaching for brown” to seek in herself the “star” material that brightened every longer academic paper. But without a guide, many of these students question why to write and how to “redo” their personal statements and supplemental essays—which are different in purpose from academic papers—so early in the college application process. But fifteen minutes later, Julia had exchanged her black-and-white overcoat for the tawny, iridescent feathers of an eagle. She was swooping down to figure out the “heart story” she wanted to tell, explaining what else was missing in terms of voice, showing me where to pause in her written pauses, and observing all sorts of options for her personal essays. In fact, her perspective became the ticket for her plan of attack, boosting her energy and confidence while bolstering how she expressed her newfound insights.

Towards the end of the first day, she reverted to her previous demeanor where we discussed admissions interview etiquette, but within twenty minutes into the following session she was already diving into the new advice. While I was asking what obstacles impeded her from materializing descriptions in her inner movie, she had recognized a particular rejection letter waiting to be recycled.

I had a mismatched foot in two different worlds where I could observe this cross during this tutoring. This student was saying, “But, all of my teachers have given this essay a high score!” at the same time, based on a double negative, one of my honors students had asked, “But how does a professional reader not identify this issue of over-editing?” The lesson was updated to underscore that the big issue was not if graduates were guaranteed to send two to three versions to admissions officers. Independent students would have a pre-write draft six weeks before the official first session, but she would have more drafts if she allowed her essays to incubate longer. Julia found that her best work grew fresher the second week. While J was not able to convince her friend of this fact, a Lucy instructed me to make this quirky learning point during my follow-up workshops in the public school district. Seven students in one public school district greatly benefited from Julia’s recommendation when using their Edswell post-graduate services. Her experiences placed the chickadee student in the warner hallway at a later date; a life without overnight schools for prudent students became clearer when that chickadee started showing how it was opposed to this internal aggression.

5. Conclusion and Future Outlook

This paper calls into question the importance of the college essay, given the substantial differences in college essay assignment and offloading with tutors as part of the college preparatory ramp up. Tutors were surprisingly able to boost effective non-experimental course essay assignment and completion, suggesting that parents not only purchased a product (college essay) to signal a student match, they also hired labor leading to an outsourcing of academic work of higher education. Educational institutions have a grand challenge ahead of overcoming increasing inequality in access to college preparation, especially as it affects admissions, financial aid, and matriculation. Future work could involve building student and mentor/counselor/parent soft skills to identify match or even reducing stress in admissions by evaluating applicants as a whole, analysis that would involve interviews and essays.