Varsity Tutors

Varsity Tutors Review:

If you are proficient at anything from grammar to law, you may be able to turn that proficiency into a tutoring position with Varsity Tutors. The site, which hires tutors for both in-person and online instruction, pays between $15 and $40 per hour.

Tutors’ biggest knock against the site is that the $15 pay range is, by far, the most common. You generally would need some advanced skills, such as the ability to tutor for advanced admissions tests, such as the LSAT or GRE, to earn more.

How it works

If you want to tutor here, you sign up with some personal information, including your email address, educational background and the topics you’d like to teach.You do not need a teaching credential or tutoring experience.

The site will also ask how many hours per week you’d like to tutor and whether you want to do this for a few months or years. It’s unclear what it does with this data.

Booking students

After this, the site maintains it uses a proprietary matching system to connect you with potential tutoring clients. Sessions are generally done online. The site sets the rates and pays tutors after twice weekly via direct deposit, after sessions are completed.

Recommendations:

Tutoring is a generally attractive job that can be done from home on your own schedule. But unless you are a new tutor needing experience, you can earn more with other tutoring sites. Our top pick in the tutoring space is Wyzant. At Wyzant you set your own rates and simply pay the site a 25% commission for doing your marketing and collection.

If you are a seasoned educator, you should also check out Chelsea International Education. However, you need a teaching credential to apply.

Want to try Varsity Tutors?

Click here!

What their users say (from Indeed)

You can make your own schedule, and the website is very easy to use. Scheduling appointments on the calendar was practical and made things efficient. There is no upward mobility and no pay raises.

A very efficiently run and monitored company with excellent customer service. You view the opportunities yourself and express interest. The company then matches you with individual students.

It’s a great part time gig and I loved all of my students! The platform suddenly let me go without explaining why, and sadly I heard that that is a common experience! You also are expected to do things outside of your paid hours, like lesson prep and phone calls, and you don’t get paid more for meeting with more than one student at a time.

Good part-time job option for college students and also an easy way to gain some experience. Exposure to other schools’ curricula.

(From Glassdoor)

I love the independence of scheduling and selecting my own students.  But I would like to receive some assistance from Varsity Tutors on mileage, especially with gas prices increasing.

The pay rates are about half of what other companies pay, but you do not need previous tutoring experience to apply.

Being paid $15/hr to teach organic chemistry with a masters degree is ridiculous.

Low pay, no training

They charge over twice as much per session as you make, and are not up front about this.

You receive no training, and the pay isn’t comparable to what you can make elsewhere.

The main downside is pay. GRE tutors are paid $33 per hour, but the students are paying anywhere from $50-$90 per hour. So Varsity pockets anywhere from 33-63% of the income. It can be even worse for high school subjects, for which tutors only earn $15 per hour. It makes sense that Varsity needs to make some income to run their business, but taking this much as profit is exploitative to the tutors. Oh, and if you call and ask if there’s any possibility of higher pay, they hang up on you.