Quote:
Originally Posted by mfattal
with these prices some one can The tutor ( if they were student) could pay for their tuition by just helping couple hours a day
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If you feel it's such an awesome deal then by all means give it a try...but I'd like to share some of the problems that arise for tutors. While it seems glamourous, and like you're raking in the dough, bear in mind that your income is entirely based on
demand. There's been a dozen or so times this semester alone that I've gone down to Mac to tutor, had about 3 cancellations in one day, and made nothing for my 6 hours of sitting around at the Math Help Centre.
Supposing tuition's $5000 (realistically, it's more than that), then it'd take 250 tutoring hours to accomplish. Given there are 20 weeks in the academic year, this boils down to 12 and a half hours of tutoring per week. (Keep in mind this is still half as many hours as a regular $10/hour part time job)
Next, suppose you have students who are
good students and want to meet you every week for an hour (and don't keep procrastinating/cancelling on you**). This means you have 12 students' (good luck getting 12 students to contact you) and 13 students' busy schedules to work around (including yours), and realistically, 5 days to cram them in.
In perfect circumstances this is possible if everything lines up
perfectly. But given that everyone has their classes in approximately the same "9:30am - 3:30pm" cluster, you end up having to say no to some students in order to prioritize for other students who have say, an assignment due.
Next, suppose
you have a midterm the next day, and so does your student (as is FREQUENTLY the case during exam season). You desperately need to study, but they desperately need your help. If you help them you're sacrificing your own study time and potentially jeopardizing your own grade. If you don't help them, then they'll say "F you, you shitty tutor" and you'll be down to 11 students (and this does happen, even for stupider reasons than being undependable).
Needless to say, it's a highly improbable scenario, I would make way more money over the week from having a part-time job, simply because I have a guaranteed number of hours. In my own experience (I'm a successful tutor if do say so myself, I've worked as one of the Math Department's "official" tutors for about 4 years now) I make roughly $100 a week (maybe $150 during heavy midterm weeks).
