Get ready to fork over $1B, Canada — school is back and so is tutoring
The school year starts Tuesday for millions of Canadian students. And beginning perhaps as early as Wednesday, some of those kids will start finding themselves unable to keep up with the academic load.
Blame it on larger class sizes (although in many cases you would be wrong about that), or less attention from teachers, or perhaps an increase in the percentage of children with learning disabilities. For whatever reason, kids’ test scores are falling: Math scores among Canadian 15-year-olds have fallen 14 per cent in the last decade, according to last year’s OECD student achievement rankings. And many parents will soon find themselves looking for a solution to help their own kid keep up with, or keep ahead of, the weakening pack.
That helps explain why tutoring has become a massive industry said to be worth more than $1 billion annually in Canada. The profits go to everyone from teachers and graduate students looking to make an extra buck to multinational corporations that have pushed their way into shopping malls and storefronts with franchise operations.
Privately held Kumon Learning now operates in 48 countries and says it has enrolled more than four million students. There’s no telling what it’s worth, but in 1999 Forbes magazine estimated its value at about US$500 million.
Sylvan Learning has more than 800 franchises — though an increasingly crowded marketplace has seen some locations close in recent years. The company behind it, Educate Inc., was sold for US$535 million in 2007.
“Our extremely conservative estimate for the global tutoring industry is that it’s worth $100 billion (annually),” said Julian Dierkes, a professor with the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia, who has studied the tutoring industry.
Research firm Global Industry Analysts Inc. forecast in 2014 that it expected the industry to be worth US$196.3 billion by 2020 as demand for online tutoring adds to an exploding sector.
Dierkes said in the past 20 years there has been a drop in confidence in public education. “Some of the drop is related to actual empirical evidence. But some people are just less confident and look to fill in gaps (in education). He said there is still no empirical evidence of the efficacy of tutoring.
For parents who have all the evidence they need, the tutoring proposition is partially based on getting a bang for their buck. Although many supplement even elite private school lessons with tutoring, others are spending money merely to survive the public school system.
Wendy Bircher, a Toronto mother who credits tutoring for lifting her children to an academic level that has allowed them to be successful in university, said she turned to tutors throughout their high school years.
She said her son went on to graduate in the top five per cent of his commerce class at Queen’s University. “And he was failing Grade 10 math,” Bircher said. “He would not have been able to go on without that (tutoring).” Her other child, still in university, has been just as successful and continues to use tutors.
Bircher said it was money well spent, even when it was costing her up to $100 per child per week during the school year. “I would think ‘I could be spending $30,000 per year on a private school,’” she said. “So this is nothing.”
Vanessa Vakharia, the founder and director of independent tutoring operation called The Math Guru — where Bircher’s kids went — said she got into the business five years ago.
“I failed math two times in high school. I didn’t fit the mould. I wanted to be an actress and marry Keanu Reeves. (School) made me feel I wasn’t a math person. But then I had an incredible math teacher and got a 99 per cent in math and ended up pursuing my master’s in math education,” she said.
While some children need the extra remedial hours just to pass, an increasing number of parents are using tutoring to make sure their kids get an advantage over classmates in the race to land a spot at a good university.
“The landscape for post-secondary education has just become so competitive,” said Vakharia. “Some programs require high 90s to get in. You might have a kid who gets in the 90s — but that’s not good enough anymore.”
Still, Canada remains a relative island of educational calm compared to the worldwide stampede into programs offering an extra competitive edge, said Dierkes. Of course, he still notices tutoring operations setting up shop everywhere. “In downtown Vancouver you couldn’t cross four streets without finding some sort of tutoring (location).”
Part of that is because the business model is such a lucrative one: most of the tutoring operations have virtually no overhead other than rent and personnel. “There is no investment requirement, no certification or anything. It’s totally unregulated,” said Dierkes.
The franchise model is a popular vehicle for these expanding companies. Prices vary but it doesn’t appear that it is getting any cheaper to get into the growing sector.
Kate Murray, who acts as a Canadian spokesperson for Mathnasium LLC, said a franchise can cost more than $30,000, with initial startup costs of $100,000. She owns two of the 18 franchises in Canada.
“The tutoring market is really untapped in Canada,” said Murray, noting more than 90 per cent of Mathnasium’s franchises are in the United States. “It’s just growing every day in the U.S., while Canada has all these struggling kids.”
Her company is focused on higher-income Canadians and generally most of the parents are university educated. Some parents end up putting their kids in less traditional schools, like arts-focused programs, but tighten up the core curriculum with supplementary programs. “They’re not confident to leave math up to an arts approach so they want the math covered in a more traditional way,” said Murray.
Kim Langen, the chief executive and a founder of Spirit of Math, a Toronto-based advanced afterschool program for children averaging B+ or above, said that Asian cultures have long put a premium on extra education for children and decades of immigration has wove that philosophy into mainstream Canadian culture.
Her program, which has expanded into the U.S. and soon, India, requires all teachers to have at least 80 hours of training before they start with her company, and fees are about $2,000 per year per student. But she does think that the industry could stand to be better regulated in Canada.
“My question is, how many of these franchises out there, or even individual tutors know what they’re doing?” said Langen.
She said that the conditions of the job market have driven people with even advanced university degrees to turn to tutoring to make some money. But the wages remain relatively low, especially compared to schoolteachers. One of her tutors was recently offered a full-time job for as low as $36,000 from a Toronto tutoring franchise.
Doretta Wilson, executive director of the Society for Quality Education — a group that advocates for public school choice — said the growth of tutoring is filling gaps left by the government-run system. But we still lack important information as to how big of a problem tutors are being called on to solve. And the question, she said, is whether it’s a solution available only to kids whose parents can afford it.